The Female Face of Shame [Paperback]

The female body, with its history as an object of social control, expectation, and manipulation, is central to understanding the gendered construction of shame. Through the study of 20th-century literary texts, The Female Face of Shame explores the nexus of femininity, female sexuality, the female body, and shame. It demonstrates how shame structures relationships and shapes women's identities. Examining works by women authors from around the world, these essays provide an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective on the representations, theories, and powerful articulations of women's shame.

Johnson and Moran's volume is well presented, highly original and deeply moving. As well as providing a new theoretical framework in which women's literature and experience can be discussed, it is significant that this is not only an academic text, but also a source of comfort, understanding and hope to marked women who suffer the emotional anguish of shame within their societies.This collection features well written, carefully researched essays that analyze an impressive range of fictional, autobiographical, theoretical, and (in one case) cinematic texts. It exemplifies feminist scholarship of the highest order and offers a timely intervention. This is a powerful collection with impressive interdisciplinary strengths.

Erica L. Johnson is Associate Professor of English at Wagner College in New York. She is author of Caribbean Ghostwriting and Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell'Oro.

Patricia Moran is author of Word of Mouth: Body/Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf and Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma, and editor (with Tamar Heller) of Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Womens Writing.

This is a wide-ranging collection analyzing literary representations of the links betwen women and shame. Johnson . . . al3%