Recent gender-based scholarship on nineteenth-century American literature has established male authors' crucial awareness of the competition from popular women writers. And critical work in gay studies and queer theory has stressed the importance in canonical American literature of homoerotic relations between men, even before "homosexuality" became codified at the end of the century. Scott Derrick draws on these insights to explore the ways in which male authors struggle to refigure literature-historically devalued as feminine-as a masculine and heterosexual enterprise. Derrick focuses on scenes of compositional crisis that reveal how male identity itself is at risk in the perils and possibilities of being a male author in a feminized literary marketplace.

Property, Women, and Politics deconstructs and contests the concept of property. It also uses important insights in recent feminist thought to suggest productive directions for a reconstructed theory of property, one in which women's work counts. The reconstructed model is applied to such pressing areas of medical ethics as egg and sperm donation, contract motherhood, abortion, and the sale of fetal tissue. It also shows how we can radically revise our assumptions about the "marriage contract."

Two experts in public health and injury control show readers how guns are products, designed to injure and kill, and how changes in the design, technology, and marketing of firearms can lead to reductions in the number of injuries and fatalities.