Women’s Studies

Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn, eds., Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism (1993), is a good review of literary questions raised by feminist critics and theorists. Stevi Jackson et al., eds., Women’s Studies: Essential Readings (1993), offers a rich collection, documenting the approaches that feminist scholars from all walks of life have brought to a broad range of social issues, including a category on cross-cultural concerns.

1. Representations of Woman as the Other

   Aeschylus, The Oresteia
   The Rāmāyana of Vālmīki (Sita)
   Kālidāsa, Śakuntalā
   Kanze, Dōjōji
   Ueda, Bewitched
   Pushkin, The Queen of Spades
   Keats, "La Belle Dame sans Merci"
   Baudelaire, "The Flowers of Evil"; "Her Hair"
   Dada-Surrealist poetry
   Robbe-Grillet, The Secret Room

2. Male Anxiety—Storytelling and (Generally False) Suspicions about Treacherous Lovers and Adulterous Wives

Somadeva, Kathasaritsagara
The Thousand and One Nights, the frame
Marie de France, Laüstic
Boccaccio, The Ninth Story of the Fourth Day; The Eighth Story of the Fifth Day
Chaucer, The Miller’s Tale
Ariosto, Orlando Furioso
Shakespeare, Othello
Joyce, The Dead
Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
Marquez, Death Constant Beyond Love

3. Accomplished and Heroic Women—Fictional and Real

Sophocles, Antigone
Euripides, Medea
Aristophanes, Lysistrata
Ferdowsi, Shâhnâme
Marie de France, Lanval
Marguerite of Navarre, The Heptameron
Florentine Codex, The Midwife’s Orations
K‘ung Shang-jen, The Peach Blossom Fan
Cao Xuequin, The Story of the Stone
Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals
Emily Dickinson, Poems
Tagore, "Punishment"
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Al-Hakim, The Sultan’s Dilemma
Solzhenitsyn, Matryona’s Home
Nawal El Saadawi, In Camera
Lorna Goodison, Poems

4. "What Does a Woman Want?"—A Question Posed by Men

The Bible: The Old Testament, Genesis 1–3
Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale
Milton, Paradise Lost
Racine, Phaedra
Pope, The Rape of the Lock
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
Chekhov, The Lady with the Dog
Freud, Dora

5. What Some Women Want—Answers Proposed by Women

Sappho, Poems
Murasaki, The Tale of Genji
Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book
Sor Juana, Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz
Inuit Song:  Kibkarjuk, "Song of the Rejected Woman"
Mansour, Poems
Storni, Poems
Zhang, Love In a Fallen City
Desai, The Rooftop Dwellers
Silko, Yellow Woman

6. Studies of Maternity

The Old Testament: Genesis, Chapters 25, 27
The New Testament: Luke, Chapter 2
The Epic of Son-Jara
Shakespeare, Hamlet
The Florentine Codex
Rosalia de Castro, Poems
Uvlunuaq, Song of a Mother
Akhmatova, Requiem
Storni, Ancestral Burden
Dadié, The Black Cloth
Lispector, The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman
Bachmann, The Barking
Devi, Breast-Giver
Munro, Walker Brothers Cowboy
Desai, The Rooftop Dwellers
Silko, Yellow Woman
Goodison, "Guinea Woman"; "Mother the Great Stones Got to Move"