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Children's literature introduces children to the world, stimulates their imagination, and mirrors the society they live in by reproducing its social rules and accepted norms. This is especially true with gender stereotypes, which display and reinforce the masculine and feminine roles constructed by a given society. This binary, one-dimensional, and conventional representation is harmful as it negatively impacts young readers' apprehension of gender roles as well as their personality, behaviour, and aspirations for the future. World-renowned children's author Roald Dahl has recently been criticised as a controversial author and a racist, misogynistic person. By adopting a feminist literary critical approach, this study analyses Dahl and his illustrator Quentin Blake's portrayal of female anthropomorphic characters, generally neglected by previous researchers in favour of human characters, in four books:James and the Giant Peach(1961),The Magic Finger(1966),Fantastic Mr Fox(1970), and The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me(1985). Female characters are weak, inactive, confined indoors, and constantly belittled by their male counterparts who are portrayed as adventurous and as decision makers. Therefore, this study aims to encourage parents and educators to teach young learners to read children's books with a critical eye to identify and interpret different stereotypical representations.

Our aim with this special issue is to revise the debates on the female fantastic from a transnational perspective. We do this by bringing together a group of international scholars who integrate the Grupo de Estudios sobre lo Fantástico (Research Group on the Fantastic). Our contributions question from different perspectives whether there is a common denominator that unifies female texts of the fantastic. We converge on the need to gender the supernatural and on a feminist standpoint in our approach, highlighting the potential of the supernatural in fiction to subvert gendered expectations and norms. We start from a conceptual distinction between the adjectives female and feminine when applied to the fantastic text. Although this distinction is at times slippery, with the “feminine fantastic,” a term that features more frequently in research in Romance languages, we mean a series of themes and characterizations attributed to what conventionally is known to “interest” or to “represent” women in texts of the supernatural. Instead, the term “female fantastic” is employed here more neutrally following the definition offered by Rebecca Soares et al.: a form of the supernatural produced by “female-identified authors […] explored from intersectional feminist lenses across decades” (xviii).

Discipline and field, as regulators of geographical boundaries and methodologies, have profoundly impacted the trajectory of Hutt as a researcher, beginning with her undergraduate degree at Chile's Universidad Católica in the post-dictatorship 1990s and continuing into her work as a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature and women's, gender, and sexuality studies in the US. When she was an undergraduate in letras, fiction and poetry were the dominant objects of study, with great emphasis placed on the literary canon. The literary theory they studied rarely went beyond the late 1970s, and feminist thought and Latin American literary theory received little attention. Courses and thesis seminars, which reflected the faculty's areas of expertise, mostly restricted their research to those two genres and to national and regional boundaries. At the time, she wondered if she should switch to a history concentration so that she could research women's participation in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century journalism, a topic out of bounds in her strictly defined discipline.

This article examines the portrait of Marie in Toussaint (M.M.M.M., ed. de Minuit, Paris, 2017) and asks how Marie is represented as a woman in the tetralogy. The study shows that although Marie is portrayed as a modern, independent woman, she is also presented with different gender-stereotyped characteristics. The theoretical and methodological approach to this topic will be based on Simone de Beauvoir’s The second sex (1949), in particular the chapter “Myths” that focuses on women and myths in a historical perspective. Another question the article raises is what may be the author’s intention by playing with stereotyped characteristics. I will argue that the author exposes a modern woman’s ambivalent situation in our patriarchal society. Furthermore, that he writes within a literary tradition that gives a stereotyped representation of women as part of the collective myths.

The differentiation between the experience of mothering and the institution of motherhood by Adrienne Rich changes the way that maternity is conceived. Viewing motherhood as a socially constructed, historically and culturally specific relationship direct our attention to the issues of gender, class, and ethnicity in mothering. This article contemplates on mothering/motherhood across cultures by exploring the mother images in Big Breasts and Wide Hips (Yan Mo), White Teeth (Zadie Smith), and The Kitchen God's Wife (Amy Tan), written by a Chinese, a British, and an Asian American writer, respectively. These novels critique the motherhood discourses that idealize mothers or marginalize nonwhite/working-class mothering. A comparative study of the novels indicates that cultivating an awareness that motherhood is a social and cultural, rather than biological inscription, is central to female agency, and that a mothering consciousness aligned against patriarchy and colonialism is essential for female empowerment.

The Exeter Book’s Riddle 33 depicts its subject, an iceberg, as a warrior woman who can cause damage to ships with her physical prowess and powerful curses. This article discusses the riddle’s union of woman and iceberg from an ecofeminist perspective, exploring the deep-rooted andro- and anthropocentric anxieties that lie behind it. It explores the riddle alongside some of its analogues, including Beowulf, the metrical charms and the Icelandic “wave” riddles, which contain destructive female figures who are associated with dangerous and destructive elements of nature, including water and disease. As well as exploring some of the riddle’s connections with these analogues and their underlying anxieties, it also brings the riddle into dialogue with modern ecofeminists. In doing so, this article also considers how the union of the iceberg and warrior woman might offer an empowering metaphor beyond the stereotypical association of the female with fertile land.

Although they do not have any factual connections, both contemporary Chinese writer Chi Zijian and Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan have deep concerns about the intertwined environmental and gender issues. By employing an ecofeminist approach, this essay aims to make a comparative analysis of The Last Quarter of the Moon and Solar Storms to analyze ethnic women's affinity with nature and the twin exploitation of nature and women revealed in them. It argues that both the two novels emphasize a general acceptance of the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman world, with The Last Quarter of the Moon focusing more on the unity between nature and humanity, and the lamentation of the demise of the Evenki culture in the process of modernization whereas Solar Storms has a clearer awareness of resistance to the double oppression of the land and Native American women.

At the center of her tetralogy, Elena Ferrante stages the manifold issues of female friendship and identity formation, of self-actualization and self-annihilation. The story of Lila and Lena, girls turned women in postwar Naples, unfolds against the claustrophobic and violent sociocultural context of a peripheral rione. Reading through the lenses of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and feminist philosophy, our essay provides some theoretical and interpretive coordinates, focusing in particular on the first, eponymous volume (2011). Starting with the Derridean notion of \"trace\" which radically problematizes the very act of writing an (auto)biography, our reflection is then triggered by Lacan's account of the mirror stage and its role in the construction of the self through specular relations. Finally, relying on Cavarero's and Butler's insights, we read the symbolic sisterhood between the two girls and their envisioning of an utopian \"city with love\" as a possible political model of reciprocal exchange and ethical bonding.

This article proposes an analysis of the account by the Brazilian Inês Etienne Romeu, the only survivor of the House of Death in Petrópolis. It interprets her testimony of political imprisonment from a perspective of feminist theories, in order to establish new parameters for the conception and comprehending of women as political active subjects in history. Testimony is understood as a valid space of enunciation built from the exchange of subjective experiences reaffirming women as political subjects inserted in a context of prison, violence and transgression.

This article is particularly concerned with the interrelation between experience and expression, womanhood and creativity. It examines the extent to which Sylvia Plath's and Zhai Yongming's writings are informed by political, social, economic, and environmental changes in a cross-cultural context. In so doing, it reveals a somewhat hidden ecofeminist awareness shared by the two poets in a cross-cultural context, which facilitates authorial reflections on the intricate relationship between womanhood, nature, and urbanization. Gendered images and symbols, as well as physical and spiritual scars experienced by womanhood, are emphatically addressed to showcase Plath and Zhai's ecologically informed confessional poetics.