Mistress, Mother, Muse

Book excerpt: Mistress, Mother, Muse: An Exploration of the Female in Modern and Contemporary Mediterranean Literature fills a vacuum in comparative literary studies in that it lays the foundations for Mediterraneanism to develop as an area in literary studies. The book is an exploration of aspects of female liminality, including motherhood, sexuality and creativity, in three distinctive Mediterranean cultures, namely Spanish, Greek and Arabic. It adopts myth as an approach to literary analysis, and, thus, introduces a new, ground-breaking method of analysis in literary studies. Mistress, Mother, Muse: An Exploration of the Female in Modern and Contemporary Mediterranean Literature represents a useful reference to students, scholars and academics in the fields of comparative literature, modern Greek literature, Spanish literature, Arabic literature, myth studies, classical Greek literature, and women’s studies.