Persephone Unbound

The seven essays in this edition join interdisciplinarity and gender in various ways, working with various discourse traditions. Bringing together gender and interdisciplinarity are based on the premise that gender analysis is epistemologically significant to all sound interdisciplinary research in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. This significance lies in that gender inquiry forces us to look for a more complex, less partial knowledge base; one in which the content of tradition - any tradition - is examined, not assumed. Interdisciplinarity, in a sense, presupposes a gender-alert hermeneutics of experience and of knowledge, and of how we come to both. The essays deal with themes from the scholarly traditions of philosophy, religion, the arts, society, public policy, environment and literature. In each, gender brings newness to the world of reading. This edition of essays is a good and invigorating read for booklovers in different languages and geographies: not only for those specializing in the field, but for all those concerned with being fully human.