Daughters and Fathers

Lynda E. Boose is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. Her publications include "The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare" in PMLA, plus articles in English Literary Renaissance, Philological Quarterly, Modern Philology, Hamlet Studies, Shakespeare Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, Teaching Approaches to "King Lear", and Vietnam in Remission. She is currently writing a book on Othello. Betty S. Flowers is an associate professor of English and director of the Plan II liberal arts honors program at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Browning an the Modern Tradition, coauthor of Four Shields of Power, and editor of The Power of Myth. She has also published poetry, fiction, and articles on Barthelme, Rich, Christina Rossetti, novel writing, and poetry therapy.

Among the contributors, Lynda Boose explores the structural implications of Western culture's central daughter-father kinship exchange stories; Leah S. Marcus examines the politics of daughter-father relations in a historical study of Mary I and Elizabeth I as daughters of Henry VIII; and Diane F. Sadoff treats "good girl" novelists George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Anne Bronte. Hortense J. Spillers focuses on the incest theme in works by Ralph Ellison and Alice Walker, while David Willbern examines Sigmund Freud's strange alteration of testimonies by women describing seduction by their fathers.Representing a wide range of fields, the authors give special emphasis to daughter-father relationships in British and Americna literature. They discuss the lives and works of such authors as Richardson, Hawthorne, Christina Rossetti, Dickinson, Thackeray, Yeats, Woolf, and Plath. In an afterword, Carolyn G. Heilbrun widens the scope of discussion to suggest that questioning conventional parent-child relationships "may lead to quite other concepts of the family, moving further and further from the oedipal or nuclear family and the system that family-construct inevitably produces."