The concept of the "human" has been broadly re-visited and modified, and the term "posthuman" has now become a term of continuous inquiry. Gender (representations) play(s) a critical role in works of literature, culture, and art, and focusing on gender is crucial to uncovering the anthropocentrism or androcentrism that may underlie the work and the times to which it belongs. While maintaining a solid literary emphasis, the ten chapters included in this volume focus on feminist debates about women, technology, and the body, on gender representation and the posthuman, on post-gender figurations, on gender and trans/post/humanism, biotechnology/biopolitics/bioethics, on feminist posthumanism, on animals, the human-machine, and ecological posthumanism. The aim of the volume is to analyse how useful these concepts may be for thinking about the subject, its definition and identity in a changing society.

Prof Dr Paola Partenza is Associate Professor of English Literature in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at "G. d'Annunzio" University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy. Among the many authors to whom she has devoted essays are William Godwin, Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Christina Georgina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, Shakespeare and Andrew Marvell.

The concept of the "human" has been broadly re-visited and modified, and the term "posthuman" has now become a term of continuous inquiry. This volume makes an important contribution to these researches. Topics discussed in the volume include feminist debates on women, technology and the body, gender representation and the posthuman, gender and transhumanism or (post-)humanism, and biotechnology.