FROM: Gail Golderman (goldermg@union.edu). Here's the latest Choice reviews for women's studies - I ordered record #3-6. You can send the info back to Maribeth if you want to order anything additional.

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This information is from ChoiceReviews.online, an ALA/ACRL publication,available by subscription at http://www.choicereviews.org.

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38-1371 TR820 99-47858CIP

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Primary Specialty: Humanities-Art and Architecture

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Foerstner, Abigail. Picturing Utopia: Bertha Shambaugh & the Amana photographers, Iowa, 2000. 148p bibl afp ISBN 0-87745-699-2, $34.95. Reviewed in 2000nov CHOICE.

Shambaugh worked within the tradition of social documentary photography, which was just emerging in the 1890s. She chose to photograph the Amana Colonies in Iowa because for her they represented a model society characterized by "a more rational and ideal life." Her photographs illustrate a utopia rather than social ills or vanishing cultures as do most American social documentary photographs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was the first to photograph a community that disapproved of photography, and her work opened the door for other photographers within and outside the colonies to record the diversity of the culture from insider and outsider perspectives. (Author Foerstner's great-uncle William Foerstner was one of the Amana photographers whose work is included in the book.) The text includes biographical essays on Shambaugh and six other photographers as well as an account of the history, philosophy, and culture of the Amana Colonies. All levels. --- S. Spencer, North Carolina State University

38-1377 PN1992 MARC

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Primary Specialty: Humanities-Communication

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Brunsdon, Charlotte. The feminist, the housewife, and the soap opera, Oxford, 2000. 253p bibl index afp ISBN 0-19-815980-3, $45.00; ISBN 0-19-815981-1 pbk, $24.95. Reviewed in 2000nov CHOICE.

Brunsdon's excellent book should be required reading for humanities and social-science-based scholars of daytime television serials and for anyone interested in the development of feminist theory and criticism from the 1970s to the present. The author's subject is "women and soap opera," understood in three contrasting and overlapping ways: "women in soap opera, women watching soap opera, and women watching and writing about themselves and other women watching soap opera." Brunsdon (film and television studies, Univ. of Warwick, UK) extends the study of soaps' audiences to include feminist critics themselves, showing how academic feminists have constituted their own identity in their written work, partly by invoking "the housewife," whom they figure as "other" to "the feminist." Exposing the irony of the way critics "worry responsibly" about members of an audience that actually includes themselves, Brunsdon performs tactful, telling close readings of articles by and interviews with the leading feminist soap critics from the last quarter century. Rich in detail about the representation of housewives in daytime serial programs (particularly with reference to British soaps), the book is an example of post-second-wave feminist self-consciousness at its consciousness-raising best. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. --- R. R. Warhol, University of Vermont

38-1400 PA6054 99-23184CIP

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Primary Specialty: Humanities-Language and Literature-Classical

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Keith, A. M. Engendering Rome: women in Latin epic, Cambridge, 2000. 149p bibl indexes ISBN 0-521-55419-5, $49.95; ISBN 0-521-55621-X pbk, $18.95. Reviewed in 2000nov CHOICE.

Ancient epics could be considered unlikely fields for exploring the importance of women, since they narrate men's experiences from a male point of view. Keith (Univ. of Toronto) demolishes this notion with a brilliant demonstration of the centrality of women at pivotal points in Roman epics and of the consequences of gendered actions that result. Keith begins by showing that epic was central to the classical curriculum and a natural locus for constructing and instilling gender differences in young men. In successive chapters, the author demonstrates how women figure as the ground over which men rule, how women give rise to wars men must fight and resolve, and how the body of a beautiful dead woman sets in motion the major events in Rome's history. The result is a compact but compelling book that makes it impossible to ignore gender roles in Roman literature. In its theoretical sophistication and rigorous attention to the language and context of Roman epic, Engendering Rome makes an important contribution to Roman studies, gender studies, and comparative literature. Written for students, generalists, and specialists alike, it is essential for undergraduate and graduate collections. --- R. W. Cape Jr., Austin College

38-1382 PN3435 99-36163CIP

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Primary Specialty: Humanities-Language and Literature-Not Specified

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Armitt, Lucie. Contemporary women's fiction and the fantastic, Macmillan, UK/St. Martin's, 2000. 257p bibl index ISBN 0-312-22666-7, $49.95. Reviewed in 2000nov CHOICE.

In this study of fantasy, the grotesque, and some of the outlines of the gothic novel in the work of women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, Armitt (Univ. of Wales) attempts to present an overview of the structural and philosophical notions that she believes link works as disparate as Toni Morrison's Beloved and Bessie Head's A Question of Power. To be sure, there are links, but by insisting on emphasizing the elements of the fantastic and the grotesque, Armitt underemphasizes historical, stylistic, social, and personal contexts. She pays more attention to the comments of other critics than to the lives, backgrounds, or literary traditions of the authors of the texts. At times, the book reads like a conversation among critics ranging from the well known (e.g., Luce Irigaray) to the less known (Carl Plasa). The topic is a rich one, and Armitt has clearly read both widely and deeply. But her emphasis on critical theory and multiple levels of what constitutes fantasy and the fantastic makes this a daunting study. The range of the exhaustive bibliography is great, but many works included play absolutely no part in the discussion. A more limited annotated bibliography would have been more helpful and would have expanded readership beyond faculty and researchers. --- R. Nadelhaft, emeritus, University of Maine

38-1384 PA8520 99-51321CIP

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Primary Specialty: Humanities-Language and Literature-Not Specified

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Fedele, Cassandra. Letters and orations, ed. and tr. by Diana Robin. Chicago, 2000. 181p bibl index afp ISBN 0-226-23931-4, $45.00; ISBN 0-226-23932-2 pbk, $15.00. Reviewed in 2000nov CHOICE.

This welcome new volume in Chicago's women's studies series "The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe" provides the first English translation of the Latin letters of Venetian humanist Cassandra Fedele (1465-1558). All brief, and in a sense virtually contentless, the letters respond to prior praise from their addressees, solicit future praise, and dole out massive encomia of the addressees. Cassandra is repeatedly lauded as "the glory of our age." A typical letter to her begins: "Hello Cassandra, flower of fearless virginity and golden trophy of the liberal arts and letters." She responds in kind, happy (as she remarks) that "letters don't blush." The texts provide a brilliant revelation of how little role there was 500 years ago in Italy for a young woman prodigiously gifted (as the brilliant Angelo Poliziano, no less, among many others, attests) in classical studies. Robin (Univ. of New Mexico) does an admirable job of translating: she makes the letters readable while at the same time indicating the elaborately learned Ciceronian style ("redolent of all antiquity," in Cassandra's phrase) through which these humanists showcased their gifts. Recommended for university collections serving graduate students and researchers. --- E. D. Hill, Mount Holyoke College

38-1387 PN682 99-40601CIP

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Primary Specialty: Humanities-Language and Literature-Not Specified

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Kelly, Kathleen Coyne. Performing virginity and testing chastity in the Middle Ages, Routledge, 2000. 197p bibl index ISBN 0-415-22181-1, $85.00. Reviewed in 2000nov CHOICE.

In this interdisciplinary and wide-ranging study of literary and cultural history, Kelly (Northeastern Univ.) considers how "virginity" is variously defined and verified in medieval and modern discourses. Using "hymenologies" (her neologism) as a starting point, the author explores how the gendered body and its cultural analogues function metaphorically and metonymically in conjunction with social and religious ideologies of sex and gender. Four chapters of analysis consider these and similar issues in relation to medical, legal, ecclesiastical, and literary texts, including the medical treatises of Avicenna and pseudo-Albertus Magnus; hagiographical narratives such as Voragine's Legenda Aurea; and German, French, Italian, and English romances, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory's Morte. Though focusing largely on Western Europe from about 1200 to 1500, Kelly concludes with a chapter on contemporary US culture, including films such as Clueless, the MTV series The Real World, and Internet dialogs about sexuality and gender identity (she includes personal anecdotes elicited from her own Web site). More culturally oriented in approach than John Bugge's landmark study Virginitas (1975) or Joyce Salisbury's Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (CH, Apr'92), Kelly's study should interest students, teachers, and scholars concerned with intersections of medieval and popular culture studies. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --- C. S. Cox, University of Pittsburgh

38-1327 PS374 99-58453CIP

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Primary Specialty: Humanities-Not Specified

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Barr, Marleen S. Genre fission: a new discourse practice for cultural studies, Iowa, 2000. 272p bibl index ISBN 0-87745-703-4 pbk, $27.95. Reviewed in 2000nov CHOICE.

Barr's previous books (e.g., Lost in Space, CH, Mar'94) focused on science fiction and feminist theory as examples and means of disrupting inherited constructs. Here Barr (science and technology, Michigan State Univ.) expands her challenge to traditional literary and cultural categories and to the identity politics implicit in them. Her enjoyable and often wittily irreverent presentation certainly is a grand mix. Edgar Allan Poe and Lynn Redgrave, Jackie Kennedy and Superman, window displays of Amsterdam prostitutes and Claes Oldenburg, Apollo astronauts and Lorena Bobbitt, black and white as indistinct racial categories, Holocaust novels and science fiction--these are some of Barr's imaginative directions and pairings. But though delighting in postmodern heterogeneity, Barr sometimes reads gender through fixed and essentialist lenses. To argue that contemporary female novelists create girl gangs while their male counterparts clone themselves ignores the experiments with voice found in Kathy Acker, Wally Lamb, and Janette Hospital, to name just a few. The self-congratulatory tone of the introduction, which proclaims the novelty of Barr's approach, tends to neglect her predecessors on this route. Many cultural and narrative theorists have juxtaposed seemingly disparate genres and cut openings through rigid categorical walls before. Still, lively readings and delightful commentary make this valuable for graduates students through faculty. --- R. D. Newman, University of South Carolina