The World Wars Through the Female Gaze

“Jean Gallagher’s book on the female subject, war, and the gaze will be one of the most important publications of this decade on women and war. Gallagher offers us compelling readings of texts and images from both wars. She has drawn together important recent theories of vision and visuality (Martin Jay, Norman Bryson, Paul Virilio, Jacqueline Rose) and connected them to a succession of works by women artists in order to explore the complex problems encountered by women who wish to represent war.”—Margaret Higonnet, coeditor of Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars

“Gallagher uses feminist critical theory to offer a subtle and nuanced approach to war literature and figuration. She examines the construction of the female seeing subject, discussing the process whereby women and what they see are represented as sites of political manipulation through the very act of seeing. . . . Gallagher nicely reveals the process whereby wartime subjectivity becomes gendered, foregrounding the essentially visual nature of war as it is portrayed in its theater. Not overly technical or jargon filled, this study is suitable and recommended for all levels—and it is a crucial addition for women’s studies and all general collections.”—Choice

“The World Wars Through the Female Gaze is most valuable as a complex and well articulated construction of the vision, the act of seeing war and making meaning, of women writers in the visual culture that belligerent nations create.”

—Cithara

“The World Wars Through the Female Gaze is an ambitious book with persuasive arguments that are bound to stimulate critical debate across the areas so successfully integrated: photography, literature, history, and women’s studies. It is also seductively presented to us in a design that attracts and pleases the eye.”

—South Atlantic Review