This volume addresses one aspect of a challenging topic: what does it mean for women to create within particular literary and cultural contexts? How is the female body written on textuality? In short, how is the female body analogous to the geographical space of land? How have women inhabited their bodies as people have lived in nation-states?

"This collection is well-balanced, with a rich theoretical context that demonstrates how the female creative process connects to discursively constructed and materially manifested bodies/texts. The essays are engaging and bring new light to authors such as Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, and Anne Sexton."-Marjean Purinton, Texas Tech University

'These essays address the mystery and power of literary creativity and the significance of gender and place in this transformative process. Clearly, women have learned to manage and even thrive in the alienating logic of their particular national and geographical situations, to translate the prescriptive and sometimes traumatic lessons of their social position into enabling alternatives. This collection asks how these external forces of prohibition and pain are internalized as personal trauma and transfigured through fantasy and fiction into new psychological geographies and different material realities.' - Vicki Kirby, The University of New South Wales; Author of Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal and Judith Butler: Live Theory