People have been telling stories since the beginning of time--sharing them from one generation to the next. In Heroine Stories, readers will read four different tales from smart, strong, heroic women. Readers will recognize some of their favorite stories growing up and discover new ones. Books include mature, complex themes at a low readability to engage struggling readers. Includes a table of contents, glossary, index, author biography, sidebars, educational matter, and activities.

Make your character’s story arc resonate more emotionally with readers. What is the Heroine’s Journey? Joseph Campbell originally wrote about the Hero’s Journey in his book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, as a psychological analysis of the classical myth formula. Maureen Murdock took Campbell’s work, her own psychology experience, and other psychoanalytical writings and world myths to develop The Heroine’s Journey for women. Often, a male and female character will respond differently to conflict in a story because culture and time period will affect a character differently due to gender. As a result, their internal story arcs will differ according to gender, also. Whether in romances or women’s fiction, often a heroine’s story arc is more about internal awakening as opposed to the “quest” style of the Hero’s Journey. This makes the Heroine’s Journey a good template for a heroine’s story arc. If readers comment that there’s “something off” with a character’s story arc, the Heroine’s Journey applied to a heroine will often make her story more psychologically resonant and satisfying for a reader. How this worksheet can help you: This worksheet consists of the Heroine's Journey explained in detail, questions for you to answer about your heroine, and examples to explain each stage of the Heroine's Journey. It will guide you in an easy way toward applying the Heroine’s Journey structure for your heroine. This worksheet will help you: —Create a more emotionally resonant internal arc for your heroine —Or change up your hero’s internal journey with one of self-discovery by applying the Heroine’s Journey to his story arc —Fix and strengthen disjointed character development —Manipulate and strengthen story pacing —Keep a character’s internal arc in a forward-moving motion rather than stagnating —Build the internal arc toward the “Black Moment” crisis —Draw the internal arc full circle in a way that will satisfy readers —Use the Heroine’s Journey even in a romance where there’s also a hero taking up 50% of the book —Double-check that the external events in the story are fueling and forwarding the character’s internal arc —Revise a synopsis or a completed manuscript Please note: this tool is not meant to replace a synopsis because it doesn’t focus as strongly on the external events and conflicts in the story—it’s more focused on the internal events and internal conflicts of your heroine. This worksheet was created by utilizing the compilation of information on the Heroine’s Journey derived not only from Maureen Murdock’s book, but also other psychology writings and an understanding of Joseph Campbell’s original Hero’s Journey. This newly revised edition includes extra examples for each stage of the Heroine’s Journey and more detail on previous examples. Are you unsure why your heroine’s emotional story doesn’t strike the right chord with readers? This worksheet will help set you on the right track.

This book describes contemporary woman's search for wholeness in a society in which she has been defined according to masculine values. Drawing upon cultural myths and fairy tales, ancient symbols and goddesses, and the dreams of contemporary women, Murdock illustrates the need for—and the reality of—feminine values in Western culture today.

Behind every great action hero is an even greater action heroine. Following on the success of The Action Hero's Handbook, which has over 125,000 copies in print, The Action Heroine's Handbook shows readers the essential techniques of fighting bad guys, adopting a secret identity, battling aliens, manoeuvring rapids, outwitting intruders and outrunning criminals-in high heels and a bustier.The greatest action heroines of TV and film are highlighted here. In chapters such as "Tough Chick Skills," "Beauty Skills," "Brain Skills," "Brawn Skills" and "Escape Skills," readers will learn to be as powerful as Ripley, as buff as Nikita and as tough as Lara Croft. With step-by-step instructions from experts ("Step 8: Squeeze your hips and thighs together to render your opponent unconscious.") and two-colour storyboard illustrations, The Action Heroine's Handbook is an original fusion of genuine how-to skills, manual format, humour and pop culture appeal.

This book explores how the next generation of teen and young adult heroines in popular culture are creating a new feminist ideal for the 21st century. Representations of a teenage girl who is unique or special occur again and again in coming-of-age stories. It's an irresistible concept: the heroine who seems just like every other, but under the surface, she has the potential to change the world. This book examines the cultural significance of teen and young adult female characters—the New Heroines—in popular culture. The book addresses a wide range of examples primarily from the past two decades, with several chapters focusing on a specific heroic figure in popular culture. In addition, the author offers a comparative analysis between the "New Woman" figure from the late 19th and early 20th century and the New Heroine in the 21st century. Readers will understand how representations of teenage girls in fiction and nonfiction are positioned as heroic because of their ability to find out about themselves by connecting with other people, their environment, and technology.

This comprehensive collection of folk hero tales builds on the success of the first edition by providing readers with expanded contextual information on story characters from the Americas to Zanzibar. Despite the tremendous differences between cultures and ethnicities across the world, all of them have folk heroes and heroines—real and imagined—that have been represented in tales, legends, songs, and verse. These stories persist through time and space, over generations, even through migrations to new countries and languages. This encyclopedia is a one-stop source for broad coverage of the world's folk hero tales. Geared toward high school and early college readers, the book opens with an overview of folk heroes and heroines that provides invaluable context and then presents a chronology. The book is divided into two main sections: the first provides entries on the major types and themes; the second addresses specific folk tale characters organized by continent with folk hero entries organized alphabetically. Each entry provides cross references as well as a list of further readings. Continent sections include a bibliography for additional research. The book concludes with an alphabetical list of heroes and an index of hero types.

Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a network of some fifty women writers, working in French, English, Dutch, and German, staked out a lasting position in the European literary field. These writers were multilingual and lived for many years outside of their countries of origin, translated and borrowed from each others' works, attended literary circles and salons, and fashioned a transnational women's literature characterized by highly recognizable codes. Drawing on a literary geography of national types, women writers across Western Europe read, translated, wrote, and rewrote stories about exceptional young women, literary heroines who transcend the gendered destiny of their distinctive cultural and national contexts. These transcultural heroines struggle against the cultural constraints determining the sexualized fates of local girls. In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women's writing as a distinct, transnational category in Britain and Europe between 1650 and 1810. Starting with an account of a remarkable tea party that brought together Frances Burney, Sophie von La Roche, and Marie Elisabeth de La Fite in conversation about Stéphanie de Genlis, she excavates a complex community of European and British women authors. In chapters that incorporate history, network theory, and feminist literary history, she examines the century-and-a-half literary lineage connecting Madame de Maintenon to Mary Wollstonecraft, including Charlotte Lennox and Françoise de Graffigny and their radical responses to sexual violence. Neither simply a reaction to, nor collusion with, patriarchal and national literary forms but, rather, both, women's writing offered an invitation to group membership through a literary project of self-transformation. In so doing, argues Cheek, women's writing was the first modern literary category to capitalize transnationally on the virtue of identity, anticipating the global literary marketplace's segmentation of affinity-based reading publics, and continuing to define women's writing to this day.