Sellers reads Byatt and Weldon in light of Apuleius's telling of the Cupid and Psyche story and discusses Christine Crow's Miss X or the Wolf Woman in tandem with Hélène Cixous's The Book of Promethea. For example, she juxtaposes Byatt's "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" with Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She Devil to reveal "the mechanisms that turn women into monsters" (40). Byatt, Fay Weldon, Hélène Cixous, Anne Rice, Sheri Tepper, and Angela Carter side by side, often generating fascinating parallels. Sellers includes a wide range of fiction by women, including genre fiction. Susan Sellers's Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women's Fiction (2001, NY: Palgrave ) examines a range of contemporary women's fiction through a lens constructed mainly from French feminist theory, particularly that of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Both see the women writers they study as using myth to rewrite and subvert oppressive narratives and open up new possibilities for women's fiction. Mapel Bloomberg both draw upon feminist literary criticism and French feminist theory in their new books. How women write and rewrite myth has been the subject of studies beginning with the second wave of the women's movement. Even though many feminist theorists have seen myth as regressive, women authors have frequently used myth to subvert oppressive structures. Although myth can be used to reinscribe notions of "human nature" gender roles, or class distinctions, it can also lend itself to subversion and resistance, for truths can be written under the guise of mythic fantasy that cannot always be told in a realistic mode. Literature draws upon myth to imply authority, resonance, importance, significance.
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