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This report on voice and agency, which builds on the 2012 World Development Report, focuses on several areas key to women's empowerment: freedom from violence, control over sexual and reproductive health and rights, ownership and control of land and housing, and voice and collective action. It explores the power of social norms in dictating how men and women can and cannot behave, deterring women from owning property or working even where laws permit, for example, because those who do become outcasts. The report distills vast data and hundreds of studies to shed new light on constraints facing women and girls worldwide, from epidemic levels of gender-based violence to biased laws and norms that prevent them from owning property, working, and making decisions about their own lives. It highlights promising reforms and interventions from around the world and lays out an urgent agenda for governments, civil society, development agencies, and other stakeholders. Among its keys findings: girls with little or no education are far more likely to be married as children, suffer domestic violence, live in poverty, and lack a say over household spending or their own health care than better-educated peers, which harms them, their children, and communities.

Discussions of Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” have focused on alienation and anxiety or the poem's formal elements. However, there seems to be a gap in explaining how these two aspects relate to each other. Throughout the monologue, Prufrock's attempts to assert his (idea of) masculinity seem to be related to how the poem uses and frustrates the sonnet form. If the sonnet is understood as an inherently masculine form and if its appearance (fully or partially) within the poem points toward an attempt to fulfil the social constraints of masculinity, then the poem will allow gender and structure to enter in dialogue, which suggests that Prufrock's inability to perform as masculine is related to his inability to both create and manipulate the sonnet structure.

In Zero K, Don DeLillo relies on the uncanny to investigate the limits of the human condition and to bridge the tension between the transcendental and the everyday. The novel's narrator, Jeff Lockhart, offers readers a tour of the underworld in his visits to the Convergence, a cryonics facility where mannequins and frozen bodies blur the boundaries between life and death. The Convergence's promise of crystalline language, transcendent truth, and immortality is revealed to be a form of skepticism that prevents us from seeing the extraordinariness of the ordinary. An uncanny engagement with the “radiance in dailiness” allows Jeff to escape the solipsism that defines so many of DeLillo's characters and to join the community of humans, linked by finitude and solitude.

In Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922), ephemeral forms popular during World War I—pocket diaries and post cards—inflect the style of soldiers and civilians alike. The novel's diaries and letters anticipate the rhetorical demands of war, which were no doubt shaped by new and uniquely bureaucratic forms, namely the Field Service Post Card (Form A.2042) and the War Diary (C.2118) as well as related commercial products that promised to insure the soldier's body and life. These forms encouraged and often enforced a concise style and cheery voice, which strategically muted the war's gruesome realities in service of optimistic national narratives. Woolf's novel pays homage to these forms at the same time that it shows how ordinary writers learned to navigate the censor's gaze and circumvent these formal strictures.

Critics have often understood Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) as an anti-patriarchy essay, and the limited understanding of that approach positions the work at one end of a dichotomous relationship. My essay argues that the purpose of her persuasive work is to transcend binary oppositions in her dialectical argumentation rather than find a home within the room. I use examples from Woolf's exploration of interior and exterior spaces in A Room of One's Own and Mrs. Dalloway, as well as critical approaches to understanding the concept of “room” as simultaneously an abstract and physical space—and much more.

Virginia Woolf was fixated on vision, the actual act of seeing and the concentrated observation of objects and surroundings, so much so that she professed, “The look of things has a great power over me.” Utilizing a psychoanalytic framework put forth by Charles Mauron—adapted from Freud for Mauron's study Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Mallarmé—and examining predominantly but not solely moments of observation in To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and the diaries, I analyze moments in which Woolf's preoccupation with seeing makes itself visible, and explore why, precisely, the look of things held a great power over her.

Harryette Mullen's Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary (2014) advances a quotidian archive of ephemera that brings into focus the convergence of ordinary affects, environment, and racial politics. This assemblage of 366 poems conceived as part of Mullen's daily walking practice also stresses the significance of race and racism to the genre of walk poem. Mullen's writing distills routine experiences, observations, and sensations into poetic forms, and her resulting collection illuminates environmental damage and systemic inequalities based on class and race, ultimately modeling how a sharpened awareness of body and place cultivates attention to broader social and ecological realities.

Readings of In Search of Lost Time have primarily focused on the function of time rather than space. But the opening section of Swann's Way, the Overture, is one of the most powerful in Proust's corpus. The narrator Marcel's relation to his domestic space is not merely a circumstance of the plot, but the condition of the plot's possibility. The interior space of Marcel's childhood at Combray creates his most formative memories. His bedroom shapes his fixation with the passage of time and anxious disorientation with his world, while the upstairs-downstairs configuration establishes the structure of obsession with his mother and the mediated desire for her, a pattern he constantly revisits in his later sexual experiences. Proust writes thousands of pages, but they are a reworking of the fundamental themes introduced in the Overture, in which Marcel's interaction with domestic space frames the major concerns of his life.

In more than a half century of writing fiction, Colombian Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez has crafted his share of fairy tales, but the story of Sleeping Beauty, or Briar Rose, seems to hold special meaning for him. Allusions to this fairy tale have appeared in several of his works, but García Márquez does more than just allude to Sleeping Beauty. He gives readers new incarnations of Briar Rose, reimagining her as a dead Caribbean dictator, a beautiful woman asleep on an airplane, and an adolescent girl christened Delgadina by the nonagenarian who falls in love with her. García Márquez's depictions of Briar Rose get progressively more ludicrous, as he mocks humanity's unhealthy romantic obsessions and our almost desperate need to believe in “happily ever after.” García Márquez distorts the Sleeping Beauty archetype to show how absurd and even dangerous it is, challenging readers to re-examine their own romantic fantasies.

Allusions to Lorine Niedecker in the work of contemporary poets Elizabeth Willis, Liana Quill, and Pattie McCarthy construct a shadow literary history that advances Niedecker's contributions more effectively than literary scholarship. Deploying allusion in ways deeply consonant with Niedecker's ethos, these works establish systems of referral that counter the more competitive, exclusionary modes of the traditional trope and offer fresh ways of understanding affinities among women writers.