SOURCE: A review of No Man's Land, Volume 2: Sexchanges, in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 22, No. 4, Winter 1990, pp. 472–76.

In the following review, Fishburn praises Sexchanges for the vastness of the authors' scholarship, and the depth and originality of their insights. Fishburn argues, however, that the book is intellectually flat.

In this, [Sexchanges] the second volume of their projected three-volume series No Man's Land, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar resume their ambitiously comprehensive re-visioning of modernism. As they did in the previous volume, The War of the Words (1988), Gilbert and Gubar work here from the premise that the originating motives that lay behind the rise of literary modernism can be best explained by the sweeping changes in the status of women that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. The importance of Gilbert and Gubar's attempt to redefine the material causes of Anglo-American modernism as an issue of...