Abstracts of Books

Abstracts of Books General Miriam Cooke and Angela WooUacott, eds. Gendering War Talk. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. xvi + 335 pp. ISBN 0-691-069808 (cl); 0-691-01542-2 (pb); $49.50 (cl); $14.95 (pb). That war is a man's game has long been a cultural ctiché, however much it ignores the partidpation of women at and behind the front and the impad of war on women. The essays in this coUection explore the specifidties of war's gendered discourse in twentieth-century conflicts, both European and Third World. The two essays in the first section consider how the erasure of women from war texts occurs even in oppositional discourse. Part Two's two essays explore the "mythopoeia" of war. Part Three deals with the "home front," induding an argument for a feminist poUtics of peace. Part Four considers the exdusions of women from war discourse and the strategies of women writers to counter that exdusion. In Part Five, one essay identifies sexual fantasy as a structuring device for war memory and another deals with the sexual dynamics of film representations of war wounded. In the final section, Klaus Theweldt offers an extended interpretive essay focusing on the meaning of lost war for rnasoiUrdty. Mary Ann Doane. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. viii + 312 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-415-90319-x (cl); 0-415-90320-3 (pb); $49.95 (d); $15.95 (pb). For Doane the femme fatale marks the excess of the female in cinematic representation: the point at which mascuUne cinematic apparatus and gaze must confront female power and desire. The essays coUeded here are divided into four sections. In the first, Doane lays out her basic theoretical grounds, using Lacanian psychoanalysis to understand spectatorial subjectivity and developing the notions of masquerade and mask as a mechanism to understand female spectatorship. Her second section, the one most closely fitting her title, offers close readings of Charles Vidor's Gilda (1946), Max Ophuls' La Signera di tutti (1934), and G. W. Pabsf s Pandora's Box (1929). The essays in section three consider the possibifities within recent feminist independent film-making for a reformulation of the conventions of representing women. The final section indudes an extended treatment of the intersection of race and sexual difference, generaUy © 1994 Journal of Women's History, Vol 5 No. 3 (Winter) 1994 Abstracts of Books 185 ignored in psydioanalytic film theory, and an essay suggesting a linkage between sublimation and aesthetics. Margaret J. M. EzeU. Writing Women's Literary History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. viU + 205 pp. ISBN 0-8018-4432-0 (d); $32.95. Margaret EzeU asserts that feminist Uterary history should self-consdously examine presuppositions and assumptions which have influenced its methodology. EzeU wishes neither to dispute the validity of feminist criticism, nor to present a new theory of women's Uterary history; instead she offers a polemical study which explores ways in which studies of women's Uterature may themsdves be examined. Drawing on strategies associated with new historicism and French feminism, Margaret EzeU attempts to uncover assumptions hidden in current models of Uterary history and to reevaluate histories that homogenize the past and subsequently marginalize or süence women writers. EzeU's study focuses on the historiography of British women's uterature from the Renaissance and the seventeenth century. Mary A. Favret. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism. General editors Marilyn Butler and James Chandler. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Xu + 268 pp.; Ul. ISBN 0-521-41096-7 (d); $54.95. The poUtical turmoü of the French Revolution, Favret points out, exposed in a newly dramatic way the potentiaUy subversive aspects of the farrdtiar letter form, as exemplified by radical corresponding sodeties, open letters, and traitorous correspondence. Women writers of the period exploited these new possibüities by reworking the epistolary Uterary conventions which defined letters as private, feminized space and which employed letters (as in Clarissa or Pamela) to imprison and punish heroines. Helen Maria Williams, Mary WoUstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary SheUey are among the authors discussed. Barbara Harlow. Barred: Women, Writing, and...