Meet mythology’s fifty fiercest females in this modern retelling of the world’s greatest legends. From feminist fairies to bloodsucking temptresses, half-human harpies and protective Vodou goddesses, these are women who go beyond long-haired, smiling stereotypes. Their stories are so powerful, so entrancing, that they have survived for millennia. Lovingly retold and updated, Kate Hodges places each heroine, rebel and provocateur firmly at the centre of their own narrative. Players include: Bewitching, banished Circe, an introvert famed and feared for her transfigurative powers. The righteous Furies, defiantly unrepentant about their dedication to justice. Fun-loving Ame-no-Uzume who makes quarrelling friends laugh and terrifies monsters by flashing at them. The fateful Morai sisters who spin a complex web of birth, life and death. Find your tribe, fire your imagination and be empowered by this essential anthology of notorious, demonised and overlooked women.

Rachel Afi Quinn investigates how visual media portray Dominican women and how women represent themselves in their own creative endeavors in response to existing stereotypes. Delving into the dynamic realities and uniquely racialized gendered experiences of women in Santo Domingo, Quinn reveals the way racial ambiguity and color hierarchy work to shape experiences of identity and subjectivity in the Dominican Republic. She merges analyses of context and interviews with young Dominican women to offer rare insights into a Caribbean society in which the tourist industry and popular media reward, and rely upon, the ability of Dominican women to transform themselves to perform gender, race, and class. Engaging and astute, Being La Dominicana reveals the little-studied world of today's young Dominican women and what their personal stories and transnational experiences can tell us about the larger neoliberal world.

This book synthesizes ecofeminist theory, American studies, and postcolonial theory to interrogate what New Americanist William V. Spanos articulates as the "errand into the wilderness": the ethic of Puritanical expansionism at the heart of the U.S. empire that moved westward under Manifest Destiny to colonize Native Americans, non-whites, women, and the land. The project explores how the legacy of the errand has been articulated by women writers, from the slave narrative to contemporary fiction. Uniting texts across geographical and temporal boundaries, the book constructs a theoretical approach for reading and understanding how women authors craft counter-narratives at the intersection of metaphorical and literal landscapes of colonization. It focuses on literature from the United States and the Caribbean, including the slave narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet E. Wilson, and Harriet Jacobs, and contemporary work by Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, and Native American writer Linda Hogan. It charts the contrast between America’s earliest idyllic visions and the subsequent reality: an era of unprecedented violence against women of color and the environment. This study of many canonical writers presents an important and illuminating analysis of American mythologies that continue to impact the cultural landscape today. It will be a significant discussion text for students, scholars, and researchers in environmental humanities, ecofeminism, and postcolonial studies.

Feminist Spiritualities aims to complicate contemporary debates surrounding Black/Latinx experiences within a critical framework of decolonial thought, women of color feminisms, politicized emotional structures, and anti-imperial politics. Joshua R. Deckman considers literary and cultural productions from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and their diasporas in the United States, exploring epistemic spaces that have historically been marked as irrational and inconsequential for the production of knowledge—including social media posts, song lyrics, public writings, speeches, and personal interviews. Analyzing works by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Mayra Santos-Febres, Rita Indiana Hernández, Ana-Maurine Lara, Elizabeth Acevedo, María Teresa Fernández, Nitty Scott, Lxs Krudxs Cubensi, and Ibeyi, Deckman shows how these authors develop afro-epistemologies grounded in Caribbean feminist spiritualities and manifest a commitment to finding joy and love in difference. Literary, anthropological, and more, Feminist Spiritualities weaves through a series of fields and methodologies in an undisciplined way to contribute new close readings of recent works and fresh assessments of well-known ones.

Nationhood and Improvised Belief in American Fiction highlights the ways religious belief and practice intersect with questions of national belonging in the work of major contemporary writers. Through readings of novels by Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Cristina García, and others, this book argues that the representations of syncretic, culturally hybrid, and improvised forms of religious practice operate in these novels as critiques of exclusionary constructions of national identity, providing models for alternate ways of belonging based on shared religious beliefs and practices. Rather than treating the religious history of the U.S. as one of increasing secularization, this book instead calls for greater attention to the diversity of religious experience in the U.S., as well as a deeper understanding of the ways in which these experiences can inform relationships to the national community.