Darwinian feminism and early science fiction : angels, amazons, and women / Patrick B. Sharp.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sharp, Patrick B., 1967- author.

Series:

New dimensions in science fiction.

New Dimensions in Science Fiction

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882.

Darwin, Charles.

Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882--Influence.

Science fiction--Women authors--History and criticism.

Science fiction.

Feminist fiction.

Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 193 pages).

Place of Publication:

Cardiff : University of Wales Press, [2018]

Summary:

"Darwinian Feminism in Early Science Fiction provides the first detailed scholarly examination of women's SF in the early magazine period before the Second World War. Tracing the tradition of women's SF back to the 1600s, the author demonstrates how women such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Shelley drew critical attention to the colonial mindset of scientific masculinity, which was attached to scientific institutions that excluded women. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection provided an impetus for a number of first-wave feminists to imagine Amazonian worlds where women control their own bodies, relationships and destinies. Patrick B. Sharp traces how these feminist visions of scientific femininity, Amazonian power and evolutionary progress proved influential on many women publishing in the SF magazines of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and presents a compelling picture of the emergence to prominence of feminist SF in the early twentieth century before vanishing until the 1960s."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction

Chapter 1: Scientific masculinity and its discontents

Chapter 2: Charles Darwin, gender and the colonial imagination

Chapter 3: Evolution's Amazons: colonialism, captivity and liberation in feminist science fiction

Chapter 4: Women with wings: feminism, evolution and the rise of magazine science fiction

Chapter 5: Darwinian feminism and the changing field of women's science fiction.

ISBN:

9781786832306 (electronic book)