The Female Face of Shame
ISBN: 9780253008732
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Indiana University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Women in literature; Shame in literature; Human body in literature;

The female body, with its history as an object of social control, expectation, and manipulation, is central to understanding the gendered construction of shame. Through the study of 20th-century literary texts, The Female Face of Shame explores the nexus of femininity, female sexuality, the female body, and shame. It demonstrates how shame structures relationships and shapes women's identities. Examining works by women authors from around the world, these essays provide an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective on the representations, theories, and powerful articulations of women's shame.


Erica L. Johnson is Associate Professor of English at Wagner College in New York. She is author of Caribbean Ghostwriting and Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell'Oro.

Patricia Moran is author of Word of Mouth: Body/Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf and Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma, and editor (with Tamar Heller) of Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women's Writing.

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