Space Oddities examines the representation of women in outer space films from 1960 to 2000, with an emphasis on films in which women are either denied or given the role of astronaut. Marie Lathers traces an evolution in this representation from women as aliens and/or "assistant" astronauts, to women as astronaut wives, to women as astronauts themselves. Many popular films from the era are considered, as are earlier films (from Aelita Queen of Mars to Devil Girl From Mars) and historical records, literary fiction, and television shows (especially I Dream of Jeannie). Early 1960s attempts by women pilots to enter the Space Race are considered as is the media drama surrounding the death of Christa McAuliffe.

In addition to its insightful film scholarship, this is an important addition to current reassessments of the Space Race. By applying insights from contemporary gender, race, and species theories to popular imaginings of women in space, the status of the Space Race as a cultural construct that reproduces and/or warps terrestrial gender structures is revealed.

To the time-honored myth of the artist creating works of genius in isolation, with nothing but inspiration to guide him, art historians have added the mitigating influences of critics, dealers, and the public. "Bodies of Art" completes the picture by adding the model. This lively look at atelier politics through the lens of literature focuses in particular on the female model, with special attention to her race, ethnicity, and class. The result is a suggestive account of the rise and fall of the female model in nineteenth-century realism, with a final emphasis on the passage of the model into photography at the turn of the century. This history of the model begins in nineteenth-century Paris, where the artist-model dynamic was regularly debated by writers and where the most important categories of models appear to be Jewish, Italian, and Parisian women. "Bodies of Art" traces an evolution in the representation of this model in realist and naturalist literary works from her "birth" in Balzac to her "death" in Maupassant, in the process revealing how she played a key role in theories of representation advanced by writers. Throughout the book, Marie Lathers connects the artist's work to the social realities and actual bodies that surround and inhabit the atelier. Her work shows how much the status of the model can tell us about artistic practices during the century of the birth of modernity.

Space Oddities examines the representation of women in outer space films from 1960 to 2000, with an emphasis on films in which women are either denied or given the role of astronaut. Marie Lathers traces an evolution in this representation from women as aliens and/or "assistant" astronauts, to women as astronaut wives, to women as astronauts themselves. Many popular films from the era are considered, as are earlier films (from Aelita Queen of Mars to Devil Girl From Mars) and historical records, literary fiction, and television shows (especially I Dream of Jeannie). Early 1960s attempts by women pilots to enter the Space Race are considered as is the media drama surrounding the death of Christa McAuliffe.

In addition to its insightful film scholarship, this is an important addition to current reassessments of the Space Race. By applying insights from contemporary gender, race, and species theories to popular imaginings of women in space, the status of the Space Race as a cultural construct that reproduces and/or warps terrestrial gender structures is revealed.

Drawing on feminist and psychoanalytic theory, this study exposes the ideological foundations of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "L'Eve Future", a late 19th-century revision of the Genesis story. Villier's future Eve, who owes her "life" to man's manipulation of sculptural techniques, photography, and film, symbolizes the complex conjunction of literature, art, technology, and the feminine in the late 19th century. The novel thus charts modernity's restructuring of traditional aesthetics to accommodate the age of mechanical reproduction. The female body becomes the locus of this manifesto of technology, producing a discourse on artificiality and and the feminine which Lathers's study exposes in detail. It also relates this monstrous tale to other versions of woman's fabrication in this and the last century, and interrogates theories of the aesthetic, the technological, and the feminine from Hegel and Baudelaire to Benjamin and Barthes. It is a contribution to current debate centering on the construction of gender and its place in literature and art.