Blanche White, a sharp-eyed, middle-aged Black maid-cum-busybody is swept up in a scandal involving a Boston politician, a teen pregnancy, and a phony spiritual advisor

"Contributors look at the writers and their works from a feminist-womanist perspective, and address issues relating to race, class, and gender. Topical entries, e.g., "Work," "Protest Tradition," "Religion," "The Use of Myth," and "Memory," provide a rich context for the literature."--Choice review.

Curiosity and the desire to grasp the specificity of an abundantly read African American genre born as the 20th century was beginning are the research intentions that inspire this volume. Indeed, only recently has African-American detective fiction drawn the attention of scholars in spite of its very diverse blossoming since the 1960s. Diverse, because it has moved out of its birth place, East coast cities, and because female novelists have contributed their own production. At the heart of this popular genre, as novelists BarbaraNeely, Paula Woods and Gar Haywood tell us, is black existence: black memory, black living places and the human environments that build the individual - hence a détour to the French Caribbean.

Surveys the lives and works of some 90 contemporary women mystery writers, who are among the most popular authors read today.

"Contributors look at the writers and their works from a feminist-womanist perspective, and address issues relating to race, class, and gender. Topical entries, e.g., "Work," "Protest Tradition," "Religion," "The Use of Myth," and "Memory," provide a rich context for the literature."--Choice review.

Table of contents

A collection of essays on the environmental justice movement, examining the various ways that teaching, art, and political action affect change in environmental awareness and policies.

A collection of essays exploring black female self-representations across all media includes such authors as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker,and Lucille Clifton.

The Female Trickster presents a Post-Jungian postmodern perspective regarding the role of women in contemporary Western society by investigating the re-emergence of female trickster energy in all aspects of popular culture. Ricki Tannen explores the psychological aspects of what happened when women’s imagination was legally and psychologically enclosed millennia ago and demonstrates how the re-emergence of Trickster energy through the female imagination has the radical potential to effect a transformation of western consciousness. Examples are drawn from a diverse range of sources, from Jane Austen, and female sleuth narratives, to Madonna and Sex and the City, illustrating how Trickster energy is used not to maintain power and control but to integrate and unite the paradoxical through humour. Subjects covered include: imagination and metaphor the traditional trickster law and the imagination humour: Eros using logos the postmodern female trickster. This highly original perspective on women's role in contemporary culture will offer readers a new vision of how humour psychologically operates as a healthy adaptation to trauma and adversity. It will be of great interest to all analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts as well as those in women's, cultural, legal and literary studies.