Susan J. Leonardi

Like the divine, divas, it seems, are omnipresent. From the sirens to Madonna, from castrati to Callas, from opera stage to drag shows to TV commercials, from George Eliot to writers of detective fiction, the diva has been worshipped, feared, maligned, parodied, and appropriated. The Diva's Mouth: Bodies, Voice, and Prima Donna Politics examines how and why, from the eighteenth century to the present, divas have been talked about with so much passion and written up, down, and over with so much ambiguity and contradiction. 

Dangerous by Degrees vividly describes and analyzes women's experience at Oxford shortly before and after the First World War. The Somerville experience, in its simultaneous rejection and embrace of women's traditional place, stands as a prototype of the ambivalent, confusing, and conflicted stories which the women who lived that experience subsequently tell in their fictions.