The book investigates Meyer’s popular Twilight saga from a feminist point of view, focusing on the development of Bella’s character and her quest for identity in a rigidly patriarchal world. Bella’s life is entirely determined by the two central male characters who form a polarized axis which slowly tears her apart. Bella’s low self-esteem and her strong attachment to the over-idealized Edward Cullen are read as symptoms of her placelessness in a world that does not grant her space to develop as an autonomous subject. Bella’s wish to become a vampire can be equalled with a woman’s desire to gain access to a higher social realm via her husband and thereby escape her marginalisation in patriarchal culture. In order to live eternally in the idealized, capitalist, patriarchal and overly religious world that Edward represents, Bella has to make a series of sacrifices. Leaving her mother behind, she moves into a male dominated world which is divided into morally idealized vampires and racially devalued werewolves. She is forced to give up her friendship with Jacob Black, who represents her autonomous self, in order to find her patriarchal pre-defined destiny as mother and wife. Similar patterns of stereotypical representations of femininity can be found in various characters of the saga. A more controversial note is brought in by Bella’s half-vampire child who can be seen as a destabilizing factor of the saga’s rigid dichotomy. Taking all this into consideration, we have to ask whether it is desirable that millions of young women worldwide admire Bella and set her up as their role model.

#1 bestselling author Stephenie Meyer makes a triumphant return to the world of Twilight with this highly anticipated companion: the iconic love story of Bella and Edward told from the vampire's point of view. When Edward Cullen and Bella Swan met in Twilight, an iconic love story was born. But until now, fans have heard only Bella's side of the story. At last, readers can experience Edward's version in the long-awaited companion novel, Midnight Sun. This unforgettable tale as told through Edward's eyes takes on a new and decidedly dark twist. Meeting Bella is both the most unnerving and intriguing event he has experienced in all his years as a vampire. As we learn more fascinating details about Edward's past and the complexity of his inner thoughts, we understand why this is the defining struggle of his life. How can he justify following his heart if it means leading Bella into danger? In Midnight Sun, Stephenie Meyer transports us back to a world that has captivated millions of readers and brings us an epic novel about the profound pleasures and devastating consequences of immortal love. An instant #1 New York Times BestsellerAn instant #1 USA Today BestsellerAn instant #1 Wall Street Journal BestsellerAn instant #1 IndieBound BestsellerApple Audiobook August Must-Listens Pick "People do not want to just read Meyer's books; they want to climb inside them and live there." -- Time "A literary phenomenon." -- New York Times

Fall in love with the addictive, suspenseful love story between a teenage girl and a vampire with the book that sparked a "literary phenomenon" and redefined romance for a generation (New York Times). Isabella Swan's move to Forks, a small, perpetually rainy town in Washington, could have been the most boring move she ever made. But once she meets the mysterious and alluring Edward Cullen, Isabella's life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn. Up until now, Edward has managed to keep his vampire identity a secret in the small community he lives in, but now nobody is safe, especially Isabella, the person Edward holds most dear. The lovers find themselves balanced precariously on the point of a knife -- between desire and danger. Deeply romantic and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight captures the struggle between defying our instincts and satisfying our desires. This is a love story with bite. It's here! #1 bestselling author Stephenie Meyer makes a triumphant return to the world of Twilight with the highly anticipated companion, Midnight Sun: the iconic love story of Bella and Edward told from the vampire's point of view. "People do not want to just read Meyer's books; they want to climb inside them and live there." -- Time "A literary phenomenon." -- The New York Times

The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life.

In the years between the world wars, Manhattan's Fourteenth Street-Union Square district became a center for commercial, cultural, and political activities, and hence a sensitive barometer of the dramatic social changes of the period. It was here that four urban realist painters--Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer, and Isabel Bishop--placed their images of modern "new women." Bargain stores, cheap movie theaters, pinball arcades, and radical political organizations were the backdrop for the women shoppers, office and store workers, and consumers of mass culture portrayed by these artists. Ellen Wiley Todd deftly interprets the painters' complex images as they were refracted through the gender ideology of the period. This is a work of skillful interdisciplinary scholarship, combining recent insights from feminist art history, gender studies, and social and cultural theory. Drawing on a range of visual and verbal representations as well as biographical and critical texts, Todd balances the historical context surrounding the painters with nuanced analyses of how each artist's image of womanhood contributed to the continual redefining of the "new woman's" relationships to men, family, work, feminism, and sexuality.

Drawing on the most important studies in psychology, human aggression, anthropology, and primatology, and on hundreds of original interviews conducted over a period of more than 20 years, this groundbreaking treatise urges women to look within and to consider other women realistically, ethically, and kindly and to forge bold and compassionate alliances. Without this necessary next step, women will never be liberated. Detailing how women's aggression may not take the same form as men's, this investigation reveals—through myths, plays, memoir, theories of revolutionary liberation movements, evolution, psychoanalysis, and childhood development—that girls and women are indeed aggressive, often indirectly and mainly toward one another. This fascinating work concludes by showing that women depend upon one another for emotional intimacy and bonding, and exclusionary and sexist behavior enforces female conformity and discourages independence and psychological growth.

Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in Transgender Nonfiction, 2013 If feminist studies and transgender studies are so intimately connected, why are they not more deeply integrated? Offering multidisciplinary models for this assimilation, the vibrant essays in Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies suggest timely and necessary changes for institutions of higher learning. Responding to the more visible presence of transgender persons as well as gender theories, the contributing essayists focus on how gender is practiced in academia, health care, social services, and even national border patrols. Working from the premise that transgender is both material and cultural, the contributors address such aspects of the university as administration, sports, curriculum, pedagogy, and the appropriate location for transgender studies. Combining feminist theory, transgender studies, and activism centered on social diversity and justice, these essays examine how institutions as lived contexts shape everyday life.

As British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to define how they experienced their era's social and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois female sensibility. Building on her earlier work in Romantic Androgyny, Diane Long Hoeveler now examines the Gothic novels of Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre Byrne, Mary Shelley, and the Bront&ës to show how these writers helped define femininity for women of the British middle class. Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now known as &"victim feminism,&" arose as the Gothic novel helped create a new social role of professional victim for women adjusting to the new bourgeois order. These novels were thinly disguised efforts at propagandizing a new form of conduct for women, teaching that &"professional femininity&"&—a cultivated pose of wise passiveness and controlled emotions&—best prepared them for social survival. She examines how representations of both men and women in these novels moved from the purely psychosexual into social and political representations, and how these writers constructed a series of ideologies that would allow their female characters&—and readers&—fictitious mastery over an oppressive social and political system. Gothic Feminism takes a neo-feminist approach to these women's writings, treating them not as sacred texts but as thesis-driven works that attempted to instruct women in a series of strategic poses. It offers both a new understanding of the genre and a wholly new interpretation of feminism as a literary ideology.

Political sociology is a large and expanding field with many new developments, and The New Handbook of Political Sociology supplies the knowledge necessary to keep up with this exciting field. Written by a distinguished group of leading scholars in sociology, this volume provides a survey of this vibrant and growing field in the new millennium. The Handbook presents the field in six parts: theories of political sociology, the information and knowledge explosion, the state and political parties, civil society and citizenship, the varieties of state policies, and globalization and how it affects politics. Covering all subareas of the field with both theoretical orientations and empirical studies, it directly connects scholars with current research in the field. A total reconceptualization of the first edition, the new handbook features nine additional chapters and highlights the impact of the media and big data.

This rich and varied collection of essays makes a timely contribution to critical debates about the Female Gothic, a popular but contested area of literary studies. The contributors revisit key Gothic themes - gender, race, the body, monstrosity, metaphor, motherhood and nationality - to open up new critical directions.