'This incisive, carefully researched and lucid book makes a significant and original contribution to transgender studies, placing thought-provoking new readings of five culturally influential twentieth-century texts and their afterlives on stage and screen in the context of second-wave and contemporary debates in feminist, queer, intersex and transgender theory. The particular strength of the study is its close attention to the complex relationship between explorations of gender/sex border crossing and discourses of race and migration.'
Ann Heilmann, Cardiff University
Explores the depiction of transgender identity in twentieth-century
Transgender and the Literary Imagination is the first full length study to revisit twentieth-century narratives and their afterlives, examining the extent to which they have reflected, shaped or transformed changing understandings of gender. Grounded in feminist scholarship, informed by queer theory and indebted to transgender studies, this book investigates the ways in which transgender identities and histories have been 'authored by others', with a focus on literary fiction by British, Irish and American authors, life writing and adaptation for stage and screen.
Rachel Carroll is Reader in English at Teesside University, UK.
Cover image: Cassils, Becoming An Image Performance Still No. 2 (National Theater Studio, SPILL Festival, London), 2013. Photo: Cassils with Manuel Vason. Courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York
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Rachel Carroll is Reader in English at Teesside University, UK. She is author of Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and editor of Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities (Continuum, 2009) and Litpop: Writing and Popular Music (with Adam Hansen, Ashgate, 2014). Her research has been published in journals including Adaptation, Contemporary Women's Writing, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Textual Practice and Women: a cultural review.

Introduction: Transgender and the literary imagination: changing gender in twentieth century writing; 1. 'Two men, so dissimilar': class, marriage and masculinity in George Moore's Albert Nobbs (1918) and Simone Benmussa's The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs (1976); 2. 'She had never been a woman': Second Wave feminism, femininity and transgender in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve (1977); 3. 'Playing the breeches part': feminist appropriations, biographical fictions and colonial contexts in Patricia Duncker's James Miranda Barry (1999); 4. Two beings / one body: intersex lives and transsexual narratives in Man into Woman (1933) and David Ebershoff's The Danish Girl (2000); 5. Blue births and last words: rewriting race, nation and family in Jackie Kay's Trumpet (1998); 6. Never an unhappy hour: revisiting marriage in film adaptations of Albert Nobbs (2011) and The Danish Girl (2016); Bibliography; Index.