BiblioVault - Books by Green, Laura

Educating Women

Cultural Conflict and Victorian Literature

Laura Morgan Green

Ohio University Press, 2001

In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, no institution of higher education in Britain was open to women. By the end of the century, a quiet revolution had occurred: women had penetrated even the venerable walls of Oxford and Cambridge and could earn degrees at the many new universities founded during Victoria's reign. During the same period, novelists increasingly put intellectually ambitious heroines students, teachers, and frustrated scholars—at the center of their books. Educating Women analyzes the conflict between the higher education movement's emphasis on intellectual and professional achievement and the Victorian novel's continuing dedication to a narrative in which women's success is measured by the achievement of emotional rather than intellectual goals and by the forging of social rather than institutional ties.

Focusing on works by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Anna Leonowens, and Thomas Hardy, Laura Morgan Green demonstrates that those texts are shaped by the need to mediate the conflict between the professionalism and publicity increasingly associated with education, on the one hand, and the Victorian celebration of women as emblems of domesticity, on the other. Educating Women shows that the nineteenth-century “heroines” of both history and fiction were in fact as indebted to domestic ideology as they were eager to transform it.

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In Search of Safety

Chemicals and Cancer Risk

John D. Graham, Laura C. Green, and Marc J. Roberts

Harvard University Press, 1988

Most public controversies about the effects of chemicals on human health revolve around the risk of cancer—hardly surprising, considering that it is the second leading cause of death in the United States. People are concerned about the dangers of carcinogens in air, water, and food, and they expect their representatives in government to protect them from such hazards. On the other hand, the economic costs of eliminating every suspected carcinogen from the environment would cause tremendous economic hardship. How should policymakers use science to help strike a balance between the benefits of lowering the risk of cancer and the economic costs of regulation?

In this important book the authors squarely address the complex interaction of science and regulatory policy. They begin by clarifying the scientific issues that are central to regulatory decisions, then explain how and why scientists can honestly disagree about these issues. They demonstrate with two cogent case studies: the heated debates about formaldehyde and benzene, both useful but potentially toxic chemicals. By examining how scientists evaluated the risks from these chemicals, and what kinds of legislative, administrative, and judicial decisions emerged from the evaluations, the authors furnish insight into the checks and balances of health-risk regulation.

They point out that overselling science in this context is harmful to both science and democracy. Their final chapter proposes creative methods for constructing a bridge between the scientist and the regulator that will be invaluable to anyone concerned about health risks.

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Literary Identification from Charlotte Brontë to Tsitsi Dangarembga

Laura Green

The Ohio State University Press, 2012

Literary Identification from Charlotte Brontë to Tsitsi Dangarembga, by Laura Green, seeks to account for the persistent popularity of the novel of formation, from nineteenth-century English through contemporary Anglophone literature. Through her reading of novels, memoirs, and essays by nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century women writers, Green shows how this genre reproduces itself in the elaboration of bonds between and among readers, characters, and authors that she classifies collectively as “literary identification.” Particular literary identifications may be structured by historical and cultural change or difference, but literary identification continues to undergird the novel of formation in new and evolving contexts.

The two nineteenth-century English authors discussed in this book, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, established the conventions of the novel of female formation. Their twentieth-century English descendants, Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and, Jeanette Winterson, challenge the dominance of heterosexuality in such narratives. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century narratives by Simone de Beauvoir, Jamaica Kincaid, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, the female subject is shaped not only by gender conventions but also by colonial and postcolonial conflict and national identity..

For many contemporary critics and theorists, identification is a middlebrow or feminized reading response or a structure that functions to reproduce the middle-class subjectivity and obscure social conflict. However, Green suggests that the range and variability of the literary identifications of authors, readers, and characters within these novels allows such identifications to function variably as well: in liberatory or life-enhancing ways as well as oppressive or reactionary ones.

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