Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference

Jane L. Donawerth · Carol A. Kolmerten

Jul 1994 · Syracuse University Press

About this ebook

This collection speaks to common themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds, from Margaret Cavendish's seventeenth-century Blazing World of the North Pole to the "men-less" islands of the French writer Scudery to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, and science fiction pulps, finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of Le Guin, Wittig, Piercy, and Michison. It shows that these fictions historically speak to each other and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a better place.

About the author

Jane L. Donawerth is associate professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author of Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language. Carol A. Kolmerten is professor of English at Hood College and the author of Women in Utopia and editor of the journal Utopus Discovered.