This volume addresses the perverse as it relates to women in various cultural and literary contexts. The debate surrounding the pornographic is underscored by critical theories that address language, image and text as either gendered or neutral, author-based or the products of the history, and the contextualizing of powers of language itself. The essays in this book look at the notion of perversion as it impacts women through traditional and less traditional modes of questioning. The contibutors examine the implications of the cultural manifestations of the perverse contained within a particular piece of literature that they have chosen.

Table of Contents:
Contents: ’When female weakness triumphs’: Torture and perversion in four plays by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Martine van Elk; Clothing naked desire in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Cindy L. Carlson; Seductive confession in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, Susan M. Bernardo; Villette and the perversions of female identity, Eleanor Salotto; Abjecting Freud: masculinity, maternity, and perversion, Deborah Caslav Covino; The gaze and its specular perversions: Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, Ernestine Daubner; Sade’s woman: essential pornogony and virtual embodiment, Robert L. Mazzola; On the Beach of Elsewhere: Angela Carter’s pornography and the culture of gender archetypes, Gregory J. Rubinson; Perverse writing - maternity and monarchy: fictocriticism and exorbitant, plural bodies, Heather B. Kerr; White trash lesbianism: Dorothy Allison’s queer politics, Kelly L. Thomas; The efficacy of shock for feminist politics: Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School and Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, Ann Bomberger; Index.