Troping the body : gender, etiquette, and performance /

Foster (film/cultural studies, Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln) offers ten feminist essays on a smorgasbord of material: medieval and modern etiquette texts, early American and Victorian literature, 20th-century novels, and film. Despite Foster's persistent efforts to cohere the essays around the notions of the "performative body" and "conduct texts"--tracts that in essence tell the reader or viewer how to behave--her notion of "conduct" is so generalized that it fails to provide the framework she seeks. The earlier essays in the book (including the first, originally published in 1993 in Text and Performance Quarterly, and essays on Christine de Pizan, Isabella Whitney, and Hannah Webster Foster) hold to more conventional notions of conduct and etiquette. But in the later essays--especially those on Frances E.W. Harper, Emily Bront"e, Wordsworth, Woolf, and Wharton--Foster examines the values and worldviews embedded in a work rather than specific prescribed or proscribed behaviors. But each essay is well written and insightful and makes good use of both primary and secondary sources. And Foster's grouping of genres is unique. So despite its categorical fuzziness and misleading title, this volume deserves a place in upper-division undergraduate and graduate collections in gender studies and cultural studies. ; Neumann College