Does gender have a poetics: What difference does gender make? How does it affect writing, reading, and the functions of text in society? The Poetics of Gender is a brilliant assembly of leading feminist critics whose collective effort presents the most up-to-date research on these important issues. The range of techniques and theories represented here are applied across a broad spectrum of texts and cultural forms, extending from women's writing of the Renaissance and the fiction of George Sand to the relation between quiltmaking and nineteenth-century literary forms, the pornography of Georges Bataille, and the theories of Julia Kristeva.

Nancy K. Miller, professor of women's studies at Barnard College, is author of The Heroine's Text (published by Columbia University Press) and coeditor with Carolyn G. Heilbrun of the Press's series Gender and Culture.