Almost 20 years after the publication of Future Females: A Critical Anthology, feminist science fiction pioneer Marleen S. Barr, together with a talented crew of the field's established and emerging theorists, reveal new critical insights in Future Females, the Next Generation. This groundbreaking collection includes contributors from across the globe who find effective venues for imagining feminist thought experiments. A multinational perspective runs through this innovative volume, focusing on the latest dynamic trends in feminist science fiction. These include such issues as race, gender, cyberfeminism, the media, and new writers in the field. Future Females, the Next Generation, which establishes the generational continuity characterizing a vibrant area of feminist literary and cultural inquiry, boldly goes where no feminist science fiction critical anthology has gone before.

Beginning with the birth of science fiction in Mary Shelley's ""Frankenstein"", Jane Donawerth takes a broad look at science fiction and utopian literature written by women. In a creative close reading of ""Frankenstein"", Donawerth pinpoints the gender problems that reside in the male-oriented science fiction genre and shows how Shelley and other women science fiction authors have typically responded to such problems. Employing feminist, social and cultural theory, Donawerth identifies new forms of science fiction that emerge from women writers as they address the problems of the genre. She includes a number of close readings from original texts to flesh out these new paradigms for the genre. The range of works by women makes this volume an invaluable scholarly review of the entire field of feminist science fiction and criticism. Without falling prey to an elitist academic discourse or establishing an exclusive science fiction canon, she generates a rigorous and extensive intellectual approach, method and sensibility that reinvents the science fiction intertext itself. The book should be of interest to scholars in a number of fields, especially women's studies and literature.

These essays treat common themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds. The range of subjects reaches from Margaret Cavendish's 17th-century Blazing World of the North Pole, to the "men-less" islands of the French writer Scudery; and from the 18th- and 19th-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, to science fiction pulps; finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of Le Guin, Wittig, Piercy and Mitchison. This collection aims to show that these fictions relate to one another historically, and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a "better place".

Margaret Fell (1614-1702), one of the co-founders of the Society of Friends and a religious activist, was a prolific writer and distributor of Quaker pamphlets. This volume offers eight texts that span her writing career and represent her range of writing: autobiography, epistle or public letter, examination or record of a trial, letter to the king, and argument for women's preaching. These selections also document Fell's contributions to Friends' theology, exemplify seventeenth-century women's English-language literacy, illustrate Fell's theories of biblical reading, and exhibit the common qualities of Quaker rhetoric. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Toronto Series, volume 65