Cora Kaplan – Double CrossingsFeminism, Race, the Popular

Collates a selection of Cora Kaplan’s pioneering feminist cultural criticism

• Examines the role of fantasy and imagination in the cultural history of racial and imperial thought, drawing upon writing from the colonial and postcolonial eras
• Explores the breaks and continuities between popular and canonical texts by highlighting the complex moments of cross-fertilization between them in which radical and conservative interruptions and realignments give rise to new socio-cultural possibilities in fiction and film
• Close readings of key and often understudied historical texts, ranging from the contested reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) to “Jane Austen’s legacy to American crime fiction” and popular suspense narratives like Kathryn Bigelow’s 1990 movie Blue Steel (1990)

The essays brought together in this book span the last quarter century of Cora Kaplan’s imaginative thinking and writing about the interrelated questions of gender, race, class and empire. They include work on feminism’s cultural politics, women’s writing on race and empire in Britain in the long nineteenth century, the reimagining of gender in modern crime writing and popular film, and the political/personal work of memoir. Linked by an historical approach to literary and cultural works, all these pieces pay keen attention to the busy crossroads of wider political, social and cultural traffic at the time of a work’s first appearance. These essays chart the changing agendas in contemporary literary studies with particular reference to the shifting profile of modern feminism, postcolonial history and theory, and the increasingly rapid circulation of narrative tropes across a variety of new and traditional media sites and settings.