Description
Book SynopsisDarwinian Feminism in Early Science Fiction provides the first detailed scholarly examination of women’s SF in the early magazine period before the Second World War. Tracing the tradition of women’s SF back to the 1600s, the author demonstrates how women such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Shelley drew critical attention to the colonial mindset of scientific masculinity, which was attached to scientific institutions that excluded women. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection provided an impetus for a number of first-wave feminists to imagine Amazonian worlds where women control their own bodies, relationships and destinies. Patrick B. Sharp traces how these feminist visions of scientific femininity, Amazonian power and evolutionary progress proved influential on many women publishing in the SF magazines of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and presents a compelling picture of the emergence to prominence of feminist SF in the early twentieth century before vanishing until the 1960s.
Trade ReviewThe fraught scientific origins and feminist legacies of Darwinian feminism that Sharp ambitiously yet skillfully chronicles and contextualizes makes this book a useful resource for utopian studies scholars...' - Journal of the fantastic in the arts. 'Darwinian Feminism and Early Science Fiction is an important piece of scholarship for students, and scholars of SF and utopian literature.'- Bridgitte Barclay, SFRA Review
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1 Scientific Masculinity and its Discontents 2 Charles Darwin, Gender and the Colonial Imagination 3 Evolution’s Amazons: Colonialism, Captivity and Liberation in Feminist Science Fiction 4 Women with Wings: Feminism, Evolution and the Rise of Magazine Science Fiction 5 Darwinian Feminism and the Changing Field of Women’s Science Fiction Works Cited Index
