SOURCE: A review of Sexchanges, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 94, No. 4, October, 1995, pp. 591–96.

In the following review, Blake examines the role of the femme fatale in Sexchanges.

The second volume of this three-volume project confirms the distinction, authority, and style of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar as commentators on British and American literature of the twentieth century, and the role of women in shaping it. This major study of modernism worthily follows Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, which have made so large a difference in our understanding of nineteenth-century literature by women, and so extended our range of exposure to writings by women from previous centuries to the present.

Sexchanges carries forward the ideas of Volume 1 of No Man's Land, giving more time to close readings of texts, and somewhat more to those of...