This collection attempts to place in convergence a few central questions: how has woman's experience of her body shaped her creativity? How do women exist in cultural contexts and, more importantly, how do they respond to cultural traditions that impose their conventions and contexts on women's identities? Does the experience of being a woman, or more specifically of giving birth, alter the creative process for women? How and in what ways are women's bodies conduits for ideological messages? How do women's literary works respond to the variety of different ideologies imposed upon them? How are the literary genres they use shaped by women's responses to their cultural positions? Large questions, perhaps ultimately unanswerable, but these are the topics around which this volume revolves in its explorations of British, American, Spanish, and Canadian women artists as well as through the various genres in which they have written.