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When Dorothy Hewett joked about needing a face-lift and sex-change to improve her standing, she drew attention to forces that shaped the production and reception of her drama. Drawing on production of her plays over four decades, and interviews with Hewett's collaborators, this book reveals how cultural memories in theatre solidify and dissolve. Viewing theatre production as a mode of remembrance, Beaglehole grapples with Hewett as a divisive figure who was ahead of a conservative Australia. Revisiting frequently produced plays, including chapters on The Man from Mukinupin and The Chapel Perilous, as well as rarely-produced works, including Nowhere and The Tatty Hollow Story, this book articulates the ongoing relevance of Hewett's drama to the history of theatre in Australia.

Escritoras españolas de posguerra rescata del olvido y estudia de de manera crítica la obra de nueve autoras que, con sus novelas y cuentos, fueron protagonistas de la escena literaria española en los años de la posguerra. Estas autoras encontraron entonces un hueco en importantes editoriales y publicaron obras que han resultado decisivas en la cultura española, e incluso recibieron galardones de gran prestigio. Sin embargo su obra ha sido posteriormente desatendida por la crítica y en gran parte invisibilizada en el circuito editorial, perdiéndose así la voz de la mujer en el franquismo. Los diferentes trabajos recogidos en este volumen evidencian el valor histórico, sociológico, cultural y literario de un grupo de mujeres marcado por diferentes circunstancias personales y unido por unos mismos acontecimientos históricos: el estallido de la guerra civil, la instauración de la dictadura franquista y los obstáculos de la censura. Con la intención de que no queden relegadas al olvido, Narradoras españolas de posguerra se ofrece como un valioso documento de la narrativa de este periodo.

Cet ouvrage représente la première collection d'articles critiques en langue française sur des œuvres publiées en France par de nouvelles écrivaines au cours des années 90. Le regroupement de ces auteures dans ce volume – Christine Angot, Geneviève Brisac, Marie Darrieussecq, Agnès Desarthe, Virginie Despentes, Régine Detambel, Anne Françoise Garréta, Louise Lambrichs, Linda Lê, Hélène de Monferrand, Lorette Nobécourt, Amélie Nothomb, Lydie Salvayre, Yasmina Reza et Pascale Roze – permet de présenter un riche éventail de la création littéraire féminine actuelle. Peut-on véritablement parler d'une nouvelle génération d'écrivaines, comme ont pu le suggérer certain-e-s? C'est la question soulevée dans l'introduction, qui analyse dans un premier temps la relative inégalité qui frappe encore les écrivaines dans le monde des lettres, avant d'évaluer comment leurs oeuvres s'inscrivent dans l'histoire littéraire contemporaine et comment elles se situent par rapport aux écrits des femmes de la génération précédente. Ce livre s'adressera à tous ceux et toutes celles, élèves, étudiant-e-s, enseignant-e-s, qui s'intéressent d'une part aux développements du roman contemporain, et d'autre part à la contribution des femmes à la culture française. Il pourra aussi servir d'ouvrage de référence pour des recherches plus approfondies sur une ou plusieurs des auteures figurant dans ce volume, et sera un outil très utile dans l'exercice de littérature comparée.

Middle Passages and the Healing Place of History: Migration and Identity in Black Women's Literature brings together a series of essays addressing black women's fragmented identities and quests for wholeness. The individual essays concern culturally specific experiences of blacks in select African countries, England, the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada. They examine identity struggles by establishing the Middle Passage as the first site of identity rupture and the subsequent break from cultural and historical moorings. In most cases, the authors themselves have migrated from their places of origin to new spaces that present challenges. Their narratives replicate the displacement engendered by their own experiences of living with the complexities of diasporic existence. Their female characters, many of whom participate in multiple border crossings, work to define themselves within a hostile environment. In nearly every essay, the female characters struggle against multiple yokes of oppression, giving voice to what it means to be black, female, poor, old, and alone. The subjects'migrations and journeys are analyzed as attempts to heal the “displacement,” both physical and psychological, that results from dislocation and relocation from the homeland, imagined variously as Africa. This volume reveals that black women across the globe share a common ground fraught with struggles, but the narratives bear out that these women are not easily divided and that they stand upon each other's shoulders dispensing healing balms. Black women's history and herstory commingle; the trauma that ensued when Africans were loaded onto ships in chains continues to haunt black women, and men, too, wherever they find themselves in this present moment of the Diaspora.

Le opere delle nostre scrittrici – da Ada Negri a Elsa Morante, da Grazia Deledda a Luce d'Eramo, da Matilde Serao a Sibilla Aleramo e Anna Maria Ortese – offrono il racconto di un'epopea sotterranea: quella della battaglia durata più di un secolo per garantire alle donne italiane piena cittadinanza. Dai racconti e dai romanzi di tanta letteratura femminile, troppo spesso esclusa dal'canone'e quasi dimenticata, emerge un quadro ricco e sorprendente della condizione delle donne in Italia dall'Ottocento a oggi. Le italiane, come ce le hanno raccontate i manuali di storia e gli scrittori, aderiscono quasi perfettamente agli stereotipi della cultura patriarcale dominante. Sono madri affidabili e mogli fedeli; sono pazienti e rassegnate ai tradimenti; sono forse capricciose e certo poco inclini allo studio e al lavoro; sono caste (salvo poche eccezioni rappresentate da pericolose tentatrici); mettono al centro di tutto la maternità, fino al supremo sacrificio; inseguono sogni d'amore. Ma già dall'Ottocento i romanzi e i racconti delle nostre scrittrici hanno raccontato una storia diversa: ci dicono di matrimoni di convenienza e di gravidanze non volute, di amori mai liberi e di un sesso vincolato a una morale oppressiva. Soprattutto, offrono straordinari affreschi dei tentativi disperati di conquistarsi spazi di libertà, di studiare e lavorare, di non cedere alla violenza psicologica e fisica della società tradizionale. Ieri come oggi moltissime donne non hanno accettato di essere costrette al silenzio. Questo libro restituisce finalmente la voce a molte di loro.

As a diary writer imagines shadow readers rifling diary pages, she tweaks images of the self, creating multiple readings of herself, fixed and unfixed. When the readers and potential readers are husbands and publishers, the writer maneuvers carefully in a world of men who are quick to judge and to take offense. She fills the pages with reflections, anecdotes, codes, stories, biographies, and fictions. The diary acts as a site for the writer's tension, rebellion, and remaking of herself. In this book Martinson examines the diaries of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Violet Hunt, and Doris Lessing's fictional character Anna Wulf, and shows that these diaries (and others like them) are not entirely private writings as has been previously assumed. Rather, their authors wrote them knowing they would be read. In these four cases, the audience is the author's male lover or husband, and Martinson reveals how knowledge of this audience affects the language and content in each diary. Ultimately, she argues, this audience enforces a certain “male censorship” which changes the shape of the revelations, the shape of the writer herself, making it impossible for the female author to be honest in writing about her true self. Even sophisticated readers often assume that diaries are primarily private. This study interrogates the myth of authenticity and self-revelation in diaries written under the gaze of particular peekers.

In How Women Must Write, Olga Peters Hasty takes us from an emphatically male Romantic age to a modernist period preoccupied with women's creativity but also with its containment. In late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia, the woman poet was invented: by women poets themselves, by readers who projected gender biases into their poems, and by male poets who wrote posing as women. Examining Karolina Pavlova and Evdokiia Rostopchina, who inspired those writing after them, as well as two women invented by men, Cherubina de Gabriak and Briusov's Nelli, and challenges to male authority by Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, this book shows women as purposeful actors realizing themselves creatively and advancing the woman poet's cause. It will appeal to the general reader and to specialists in Russian literature, women's studies, and cultural history.

Die Literatur der Jahrhundertwende lässt sich aufgrund der Vielfalt der literarischen Produktion und poetologischen Programmatik nicht auf einen Epochenbegriff bringen, doch in einem Punkt sind sich sogar widerstreitende Literaturhistoriker einig: Für sie lag die Literaturproduktion um 1900 (1880 – 1914/18) ausschließlich in männlicher Hand. Schriftstellerinnen werden entweder gar nicht oder nur beiläufig erwähnt, mit Ausnahme von Ricarda Huch, gelegentlich Gabriele Reuter und in Verbindung mit Nietzsche und Rilke Lou Andreas-Salomé. Während die Literatur von Frauen um 1900 von der zeitgenössischen Kritik als aktuell und innovativ gewürdigt wurde, sind die Autorinnen aus dem bestehenden literarischen Kanon weitestgehend ausgeschlossen. Dieses Buch versteht sich nicht zuletzt auch als Plädoyer dafür, ihnen einen angemessenen Platz in der modernen Literaturgeschichtsschreibung einzuräumen. Außerdem möchte es dazu anregen, die zu Unrecht vergessenen Schriftstellerinnen des Fin de Siècle wieder zu entdecken und ihre Werke neu zu lesen.

Dorothy Richardson is a major modernist novelist, only now beginning to attract the critical attention she deserves. In her time she was regarded as a pioneer, the originator of narrative ‘stream of consciousness', her exploration of a woman's consciousness comparable to Proust. In this innovative study, Carol Watts reads her extraordinary thirteen-volume novel Pilgrimagein its context, as a difficult record, a ‘screen memory', of the impact of modern urban life on a new woman gradually emerging from the domestic constraints of Victorian tradition. The book draws on Richardson's short fiction and for the first time assesses the significance of her contributions to the avant-garde film journal,Close Up. Richardson's attempt to forge an adequate language for the representation of women's experience in modernity leads her to the public space of silent cinema. This study offers an exciting challenge to common readings of literary modernism, and a powerful argument as to why Dorothy Richardson is not Virginia Woolf.

La guerra di Liberazione, cui in Italia non è certo mancata la partecipazione civile, ha aperto la speranza di un futuro migliore, tutto da costruire (o ricostruire), donne e uomini insieme. In quella straordinaria stagione dell'Italia, anche le donne hanno partecipato alla Resistenza, prendendo in mano la loro vita e combattendo nei modi più diversi. Hanno sostituito gli uomini nel lavoro, hanno sostenuto le famiglie, hanno offerto solidarietà, rifugio e cura ai partigiani. Pur essendo attive e partecipi, non tutte hanno imbracciato le armi. Alcune di loro hanno scritto, parlato alla radio, istigato al sabotaggio, alla rivolta contro il nazifascismo: insomma hanno usato le parole come armi. La comunicazione è stata la loro trincea. Parole armate ricostruisce questa pagina della storia d'Italia ancora poco nota, seguendo alcune scrittrici italiane, tra cui Anna Banti, Maria Bellonci, Alba de Céspedes e Natalia Ginzburg, e ricostruendo il ruolo che hanno svolto durante la Resistenza e nell'immediato dopoguerra, continuando a combattere con l'arma della parola per una democrazia capace di calarsi fin dentro la relazione tra i due sessi. Un racconto avvincente che intreccia storia, letteratura e vita femminile.

Acknowledgements — Preface by Maria Anita Stefanelli — 1. Making Visible. Theatrical Form as Metaphor: Marina Carr and Caryl Churchill by Cathy Leeney — 2. Obscene Transformations: Violence, Women and Theatre in Sarah Kane and Marina Carr by Melissa Sihra — 3. Can the Subaltern Dream? Epistemic Violence, Oneiric Awakenings and the Quest for Subjective Duality in Marina Carr's Marble - Interview with Marina Carr - Excerpt from Marble by Marina Carr by Valentina Rapetti — 4. “The house is a battlefield now”: War of the Sexes and Domestic Violence in Van Badham's Kitchen and Warren Adler's The War of the Roses - Interview with Van Badham - Excerpt from Kitchen by Van Badham by Barbara Miceli — 5. Serial Killers, Serial Lovers: Raquel Almazan's La Paloma Prisoner - Interview with Raquel Almazan - Excerpt from La Paloma Prisoner by Raquel Almazan by Alessandro Clericuzio — 6. “To Put My Life Back into the Main Text”: Re-Dressing History in The Second Coming of Joan of Arc by Carolyn Gage - Interview with Carolyn Gage - Excerpt from The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays by Carolyn Gage by Sabrina Vellucci — 7. Turning Muteness into Performance in Erin Shields'If We Were Birds - Interview with Erin Shields - Excerpt from If We Were Birds by Erin Shields by Maria Anita Stefanelli — 8. Afterword: Vocal and Verbal Assertiveness by Kate Burke — Contributors An extraordinary complexity characterizes the encounter between theatre, mythology, and human rights when gender-based violence is on the platform. Another encounter enhances the cross-disciplinary and transnational dynamics in this book: the one between the scholar and the playwright, who exchange views to pursue a theme demanding due attention at an emergence that needs being explored to be understood and combated, and finally turned into a priority action. Through the analysis of a repertoire of contemporary plays and performance practices from English-speaking countries, the contributors explore in detail the asymmetrical relations that exist between men and women, the crimes involved, and the ways in which the protagonists'minds work differently. The unconventional format adopted for the five central sections that follow two papers centered on Marina Carr's theatre in comparison with two noteworthy British playwrights', and that forerun the final stringent remarks about woman's (like man's) fundamental right to speak and need for words, offers not just single chapters, however provocative, on an aspect of the theme, but a tripartite session boasting a critical inquiry into the text, the playwright's response to criticism, and a sample of the author's creative expression. What emerges is a prismatic, complex, and visceral vision of the plays offered to the public for further elaboration and critique. Beside Carr, those involved are Raquel Almazan, Van Badham, Carolyn Gage and Erin Shields – all of them champions of today's feminist commitment to denounce, through their art, violence against women.

According to Molly Hite, a number of influential contemporary women novelists—notably Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, and Margaret Atwood—attempt innovations in narrative form that are more radical in their implications than the dominant modes of fictional experimentation characterized as postmodernist. In The Other Side of the Story, Hite makes the point that these innovations, which distinguish the genre she calls contemporary feminist narrative, are more radical precisely because their context is the critique of a culture and a literary tradition apprehended as profoundly masculinist.

Cet ouvrage prend appui sur une sélection d'une vingtaine de romans africains francophones écrits entre 1881 et 2003. De leur analyse émergent deux figures de la femme africaine : celle qui sait communiquer et qui entretient des relations harmonieuses avec son entourage - assimilée à une'bonne'femme - et celle rejetée, considérée comme une'mauvaise'femme et avec qui les relations sont antagoniques. Il passe également en revue les critères d'appréciation de la la femme en Afrique, au fur et à mesure de la modernisation de ce continent.

This book investigates sisterhood as a converging thread that wove female subjectivities and intersubjectivities into a larger narrative of Chinese modernity embedded in a newly conceived global context. It focuses on the period between the late Qing reform era around the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, which saw the emergence of new ways of depicting Chinese womanhood in various kinds of media. In a critical hermeneutic approach, Zhu combines an examination of an outside perspective (how narratives and images about sisterhood were mobilized to shape new identities and imaginations) with that of an inside perspective (how subjects saw themselves as embedded in or affected by the discourse and how they negotiated such experiences within texts or through writing). With its working definition of sisterhood covering biological as well as all kinds of symbolic and metaphysical connotations, this book exams the literary and cultural representations of this elastic notion with attention to, on the one hand, a supposedly collective identity shared by all modern Chinese female subjects and, on the other hand, the contesting modes of womanhood that were introduced through the juxtaposition of divergent “sisters.” Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical materials, literary and cultural analysis, and theoretical questions, Zhu conducts a careful examination of how new identities, subjectivities and sentiments were negotiated and mediated through the hermeneutic circuits around “sisterhood.”

Contemporary female novelists tend to portray the relationship between women and the state as profoundly negative, in contrast to various constructions in current feminist theory. Martine Watson Brownley analyzes novels by Margaret Atwood, Paule Marshall, Nadine Gordimer, and Margaret Drabble to explore the significance of this disparity. The book uses literary analysis to highlight elements of state power that many feminist theorists currently occlude, ranging from women's still minimal access to state politics to the terrifying violence exercised by modern states. At the same time, however, feminist theory clarifies major elements in many contemporary women's lives about which the novels are ambivalent or misleading, such as romantic love and the role of sexuality in state politics. Deferrals of Domain fills a double gap, both authorial and topical, in current critical treatments of women writers and will be of interest to both literary and women's studies scholars.

In her reassessment of Amy Lowell as a major figure in the modern American poetry movement, Melissa Bradshaw uses theories of the diva and female celebrity to account for Lowell's extraordinary literary influence in the early twentieth century and her equally extraordinary disappearance from American letters after her death. Recognizing Amy Lowell as a literary diva, Bradshaw shows, accounts for her commitment to her art, her extravagant self-promotion and self-presentation, and her fame, which was of a kind no longer associated with poets. It also explains the devaluation of Lowell's poetry and criticism, since a woman's diva status is always short-lived and the accomplishments of celebrity women are typically dismissed and trivialized. In restoring Lowell to her place within the American poetic renaissance of the nineteen-teens and twenties, Bradshaw also recovers a vibrant moment in popular culture when poetry enjoyed mainstream popularity, audiences packed poetry readings, and readers avidly followed the honors, exploits, and feuds of their favorite poets in the literary columns of daily newspapers. Drawing on a rich array of letters, memoirs, newspapers, and periodicals, but eschewing the biographical interpretations of her poetry that have often characterized criticism on Lowell, Bradshaw gives us an Amy Lowell who could not be further removed from the lonely victim of ill-health and obesity who appears in earlier book-length studies. Amy Lowell as diva poet takes her rightful place as a powerful writer of modernist verse who achieved her personal and professional goals without capitulating to heteronormative ideals of how a woman should act, think, or appear.

The Fiction of Anita Brookner is the first full-length study of this controversial contemporary writer. After discussing critical assessments of Brookner, and attempts to relate her to various classics and contemporaries, Dr Skinner skilfully combines insights from recent narrative theory with close analyses of nine novels. Moving from the first novels, and their close relations to French literary models, he goes on to trace the increased sophistication of Hotel du Lac and the technical innovations of its successors.

This collection of contemporary criticism explores her concern with racial and gender issues and analyzes her in relation to other major modern authors, her philosophical and religious speculations, and her preoccupation with the process of fiction-making.These classics provide a broad look at critical argument about Toni Morrison's meanings and significance during the past 10 years. From the formative effects of learning one's Otherness as a result of majority perception, to the apocalyptic implications of racial memory, to the moral and psychologically constructive act of storytelling, to the structural function served by improvisational jazz music, to the imagery associated with both flight and naming, to the uniquely female experience of community-major issues raised by Morrison's body of work are explicated here.

Examining Margaret Atwood's work in the context of the complex history of the Bildungsroman, Ellen McWilliams explores how the genre has been appropriated by women writers in the second half of the twentieth century. She demonstrates that Atwood's early work - her own'coming of age'fiction, including unpublished works as well as The Edible Woman, Surfacing, and Lady Oracle - both engages with and works against the paradigms of identity which are traditionally associated with the genre. Making extensive use of unpublished manuscripts in the Atwood Collection at the University of Toronto, McWilliams uncovers influences that shaped Atwood's fashioning of identity in her early novels, paying particular attention to Atwood's preoccupation with survival as a key symbol of Canadian literature, culture, and identity. She also considers the genre's afterlife on display in Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and Moral Disorder, in which the formulations of selfhood and identity in Atwood's early fiction are revisited and developed. Atwood emerges as a writer who self-consciously invokes and then undercuts the traditions of the Bildungsroman, a turn that may be read as a means of at once interrogating and perpetuating the form. McWilliams's book furthers our understanding of subjectivity in Atwood's fiction and contributes to ongoing conversations about the role gender and cultural contexts play in reframing generic boundaries.

Thirteen original essays on Gertrude Stein, H. D., Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gwendolyn Brooks demonstrate how these women expand the social, textual, and political boundaries of modernism. The collection places these poets in the context of their times, examining the conditions that helped shape their vivid and diverse poetic careers and reconsidering some of the assumptions that have led to their exclusion from the main narratives of modernist poetry.Ultimately, the aim is to enlarge the literary history of the movement—for gendered, modernism extends backward to the first years of the century, and forward to the beginnings of postmodernism in the 1960s.

After Dorothy L. Sayers became famous for her fictional sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, she began investigating the mysteries of Anglo-Catholic Christianity, writing plays for both stage and radio. However, because her modernist contemporaries disdained both best-sellers and religious fiction, Sayers has been largely overlooked by the academy. Writing Performances is the first work to position Sayers'diverse writings within the critical climate of high modernism. Employing exuberant illustrations from Sayers'detective fiction to make theoretical issues accessible, the book employs insights from performance theory to argue that Sayers, though a popularizer, presciently anticipated the postmodern ironizing of Enlightenment rationality and scientific objectivity.

One a lyric'confessional'poet and essayist, the other a jazz'spoken-word'performance artist, Adrienne Rich and Jayne Cortez were American feminist superheroes who produced extensive bodies of poetic work that reveal strangely overlapping visions, but in radically different voices and poetic styles. This book reconsiders the poetry activism of Cortez and Rich side-by-side, engaging poetics theory, cultural studies, and popular media in its literary analyses. A collection of eight integrated chapters by multiple poetry critics, as well as an artist-statement narrative by Wonder Woman sculptor Linda Stein, the book focuses upon the voice of bravado, the various calls for global justice, and Third Wave feminist'intersectional'critiques all embodied within these two women's poetic texts. The book also examines the twentieth-century figure of the American superhero, particularly Wonder Woman, bringing popular-culture studies into conversation with literary criticism, as well as visual art through the inclusion of Stein's commentary and illustrations. This beautiful and compelling book experiments with the festschrift concept by inviting multiple and competing disciplinary views on U.S. feminist poetics, women's art and aesthetics, racial and sexual identities, as well as politics and performance—all in tribute to the power of poetry by Cortez and Rich.

Elizabeth Bishop is one of the greatest and most influential American poets of the 20th century. First published in hardback in 1998, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop is a highly illuminating reader's guide written by another leading poet which makes full use of the letters Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Anne Stevenson from Brazil in the 1960s. Anne Stevenson is a major American and British poet who has published many books of poetry, including her Poems 1955-2005 in 2005. Her other books include Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989), the first critical study of Elizabeth Bishop (1966), and a book of essays, Between the Iceberg and the Ship (1998). Each of her five chapters looks at a different aspect of Bishop's art. In the Waiting Room links her life-long search for self-placement to her unsettled childhood. Time's Andromeda shows how a youthful fascination with 17th-century baroque art ripened, in the 1930s, into a unique brand of metaphysical surrealism. Living with the Animals considers ways in which Bishop, like Walt Whitman, deserted the literary mode of the fable to give autonomy and authority to natural creatures. Two final chapters focus on the poet's Darwinian acceptance of evolutionary change and her steady look at the'geographical mirror'that in her later work replaced the figure of the looking-glass as an emblem of imagination. Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop represents a view of her work Bishop herself would have recognised and approved. A chronology and a set of maps serve as practical guides to the poet's life and travels.'A compelling book; patiently and intelligently, Stevenson elucidates and illuminates her subject, relating work and life with exemplary tact. I read it with mounting excitement and, ultimately, gratitude. In a healthy culture, it would be a bestseller'- Lachlan Mackinnon, Thumbscrew'Biography and close reading of Bishop's poems and prose'complement each other in [this study] which must surely be the best available introduction to that marvellous poet'- John Mole, TLS

Curious about her enduring love for Richard Brautigan's work, Allison Green embarks on a roadtrip tracing the route of his most famous work, Trout Fishing in America. As she travels, she examines the way we relate to the things that influence us—the ancestors who created us, the past that shaped us, the writers who changed the way we saw the world—and how these things intertwine to make us who we are. The Ghosts Who Travel With Me speaks to a forgotten generation while breaking the confines of traditional memoir.

Beth Henley was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play for her first full-length play, Crimes of the Heart, yet there has been no book-length consideration of her body of work until now. This volume includes original essays that contextualize and analyze her works from a variety of perspectives, focusing on her vexed status as a southern writer, her use of the comic grotesque, and her alleged feminist critiques of modern society. Receiving special attention are lesser-known plays which are crucial to understanding Henley's development as a playwright and postmodern thinker.

Focusing on literary authors, social reformers, journalists, and anthropologists, Francesca Sawaya demonstrates how women intellectuals in early twentieth-century America combined and criticized ideas from both the Victorian'cult of domesticity'and the modern'culture of professionalism'to shape new kinds of writing and new kinds of work for themselves.Sawaya challenges our long-standing histories of modern professional work by elucidating the multiple ways domestic discourse framed professional culture. Modernist views of professionalism typically told a racialized story of a historical break between the primitive, feminine, and domestic work of the Victorian past and the modern, masculine, professional expertise of the present. Modern Women, Modern Work historicizes this discourse about the primitive labor of women and racial others and demonstrates how it has been adopted uncritically in contemporary accounts of professionalism, modernism, and modernity.Seeking to recuperate black and white women's contestations of the modern professions, Sawaya pairs selected novels with a broad range of nonfiction writings to show how differing narratives about the transition to modernity authorized women's professionalism in a variety of fields. Among the figures considered are Jane Addams, Ruth Benedict, Willa Cather, Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Sarah Orne Jewett, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Ida Tarbell. In mapping out the constraints women faced in their writings and their work, and in tracing the slippery compromises they embraced and the brilliant adaptations they made, Modern Women, Modern Work boldly reenvisions the history of modern professionalism in the United States.

While many people see ‘home'as the domestic sphere and place of belonging, it is hard to grasp its manifold implications, and even harder to provide a tidy definition of what it is. Over the past century, discussion of home and nation has been a highly complex matter, with broad political ramifications, including the realignment of nation-states and national boundaries. Against this backdrop, this book suggests that ‘home'is constructed on the assumption that what it defines is constantly in flux and thus can never capture an objective perspective, an ultimate truth.Along these lines, Unreliable Truths offers a comparative literary approach to the construction of home and concomitant notions of uncertainty and unreliable narration in South Asian diasporic women's literature from the UK, Australia, South Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Canada. Writers discussed in detail include Feroza Jussawalla, Suneeta Peres da Costa, Meera Syal, Farida Karodia, Shani Mootoo, Shobha Dé, and Oonya Kempadoo. With its focus on transcultural homes, Unreliable Truths goes beyond discussions of diaspora from an established postcolonial point of view and contributes with its investigation of transcultural unreliable narration to the representation of a g/local South Asian diaspora.

Widely acclaimed for her powerful explorations of race, womanhood, spirituality, and mortality, poet Lucille Clifton has published thirteen volumes of poems since 1969 and has received numerous accolades for her work, including the 2000 National Book Award for Blessing the Boats. Her verse is featured in almost every anthology of contemporary poetry, and her readings draw large and enthusiastic audiences. Although Clifton's poetry is a pleasure to read, it is neither as simple nor as blithely celebratory as readers sometimes assume. The bursts of joy found in her polished, elegant lines are frequently set against a backdrop of regret and sorrow. Alternately consoling, stimulating, and emotionally devastating, Clifton's poems are unforgettable. In Wild Blessings, Hilary Holladay offers the first full-length study of Clifton's poetry, drawing on a broad knowledge of the American poetic tradition and African American poetry in particular. Holladay places Clifton's poems in multiple contexts -- personal, political, and literary -- as she explicates major themes and analyzes specific works: Clifton's poems about womanhood, a central concern throughout her career; her fertility poems, which are provocatively compared with Sylvia Plath's poems on the same subject; her relation to the Black Arts Movement and to other black female poets, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez; her biblical poems; her elegies; and her poignant family history, Generations, an extended prose poem. In addition to a new preface written after Clifton's death in 2010, this updated edition includes an epilogue that discusses the poetry collections she published after 2004.Readers encountering Lucille Clifton's poems for the first time and those long familiar with her distinctive voice will benefit from Hilary Holladay's striking insights and her illuminating interview with the influential American poet.

Altruism and self-assertiveness went hand in hand for Victorian women. During a period when most lacked property rights and professional opportunities, gift transactions allowed them to enter into economic negotiations of power as volatile and potentially profitable as those within the market systems that so frequently excluded or exploited them. They made presents of holiday books and homemade jams, transformed inheritances into intimate or aggressive bequests, and, in both prose and practice, offered up their own bodies in sacrifice. Far more than selfless acts of charity or sure signs of their suitability for marriage, such gifts radically reconstructed women's personal relationships and public activism in the nineteenth century. Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women's giving from the 1820s to the First World War. Attending to the dynamic action and reaction of gift exchange in fiction and poetry by Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti as well as in literary annuals, Salvation Army periodicals, and political pamphlets, Rappoport demonstrates how female authors and fictional protagonists alike mobilized networks outside of marriage and the market. Through giving, women redefined the primary allegiances of their everyday lives, forged public coalitions, and advanced campaigns for abolition, slum reform, eugenics, and suffrage.

This interdisciplinary anthology highlights exiled/alienated women in literature, history, and cinema. Contributors investigate when and how women from diverse backgrounds have been relegated to the margins in order to shed light on the state of alienhood that stems from gendered otherness.

Among the first critical works on Alice Munro's writing, this study of her short fiction is informed by the disciplines of narratology and literary linguistics. Through examining Munro's narrative art, Isla Duncan demonstrates a rich understanding of the complex, densely layered, often unsettling stories.

In Flannery O'Connor's Dark Comedies, Carol Shloss moves from biographical, thematic, and theological approaches and instead focuses her criticism on the successes and failures of O'Connor as a rhetorician. This valuable study of O'Connor's style uses reader-response theory to dissect the author's use of hyperbole, distortion, allusion, analogy, the dramatization of extreme religious experience, the manipulation of judgment through narrative voice, and direct address to the reader. Schloss aims to return Flannery O'Connor to her readers on fathomable terms, to offer a rhetorical, rather than theological, perspective from which to understand the country preachers, square-jawed farm wives, wise rubes, foolish intellectuals, huckster Bible salesmen, killers, and other'good country people'who populate O'Connor's fiction.

Mexican women writers moved to the forefront of their country's literature in the twentieth century. Among those who began publishing in the 1970s and 1980s are Maria Luisa Puga, Silvia Molina, Brianda Domecq, Carmen Boullosa, and Angeles Mastretta. Sharing a range of affinities while maintaining distinctive voices and outlooks, these are the women whom Gabriella de Beer has chosen to profile in Contemporary Mexican Women Writers. De Beer takes a three-part approach to each writer. She opens with an essay that explores the writer's apprenticeship and discusses her major works. Next, she interviews each writer to learn about her background, writing, and view of herself and others. Finally, de Beer offers selections from the writer's work that have not been previously published in English translation. Each section concludes with a complete bibliographic listing of the writer's works and their English translations. These essays, interviews, and selections vividly recreate the experience of being with the writer and sharing her work, hearing her tell about and evaluate herself, and reading the words she has written. The book will be rewarding reading for everyone who enjoys fine writing.

This book is a compelling reference guide for book clubs on the work of Joan Didion, with summaries of her major works and discussion questions.Reading Joan Didion is the ideal way to enter this extraordinary and versatile author's world—a world that counts among its citizens burned-out hippies, cynical and delusional players in the film and music scene, and even members of the Charles Manson family.In addition to looking closely at major works of fiction, Reading Joan Didion also focuses on Didion the essayist, critic, and founding member of the New Journalism Movement, which uses fiction-like narrative techniques to go deeper into subjects that traditional objective reporting allows. Also covered is the rich screenwriting partnership of Didion and husband John Gregory Dunne, and the overwhelming late-career success of The Year of Magical Thinking, written in the aftermath of Dunne's shocking death and completed just before the author's daughter also passed away unexpectedly.

Best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver's life and works are explored in this comprehensive, unique reference guide. Ideal for book club members and essential for high school students, this valuable resource introduces the plot summaries as well as theme and character analysis for seven of Kingsolver's major works. Kingsolver's usual topics, primarily focusing on the working class, environmental issues, feminism, and Native American studies, are closely examined in relation to current events and contemporary popular culture. Also discussed are Kingsolver's presence on the Internet, as well as the media's reception of the author. Each chapter concludes with thought-provoking, analytical discussion questions, ideal for encouraging book club conversation as well as stimulating classroom discussion. The What Do I Read Next chapter will delight readers who enjoy Kingsolver's work. This guide is a must-have for public and high school library shelves!Best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver's life and works are explored in this comprehensive, unique reference guide. Ideal for book club members and essential for high school students, this valuable resource introduces the plot summaries as well as theme and character analysis for seven of Kingsolver's major works. Kingsolver's usual topics, primarily focusing on the working class, environmental issues, feminism, and Native American studies, are closely examined in relation to current events and contemporary popular culture. Also discussed are Kingsolver's presence on the Internet, as well as the media's reception of the author. Each chapter concludes with thought-provoking, analytical discussion questions, ideal for encouraging book club conversation as well as stimulating classroom discussion. The What Do I Read Next chapter will delight readers who enjoy Kingsolver's work. This guide is a must-have for public and high school library shelves!

Analyzing novels by women writers from the 1850s to the 1930s, this book argues that representations of mobility offer a fruitful way to explore the location of women within modernity and, specifically, the opportunities for (or limitations on) women's agency in this period, considering the mobility of the female subject in the city and beyond.

Working Women, Literary Ladies explores the simultaneous entry of working-class women in the United States into wage-earning factory labor and into opportunities for mental and literary development. It is the first book to examine the fascinating exchange between the work and literary spheres for laboring women in the rapidly industrializing America of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As women entered the public sphere as workers, their opportunities for intellectual growth expanded, even as those same opportunities were often tightly circumscribed by the factory owners who were providing them. These developments, both institutional and personal, opened up a range of new possibilities for working-class women that profoundly affected women of all classes and the larger social fabric. Cook examines the extraordinary and diverse literary productions of these working women, ranging from their first New England magazine of belles lettres, The Lowell Offering, to Emma Goldman's periodical, Mother Earth; from Lucy Larcom's epic poem of female factory life, An Idyl of Work, to Theresa Malkiel's fictional account of sweatshop workers in New York, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker. This vital new book traces the hopes and tensions generated by the expectations of working-class women as they created a wholly new way of being alive in the world.

Between the two world wars, American publishing entered a'golden age'characterized by an explosion of new publishers, authors, audiences, distribution strategies, and marketing techniques. The period was distinguished by a diverse literary culture, ranging from modern cultural rebels to working-class laborers, political radicals, and progressive housewives. In America the Middlebrow, Jaime Harker focuses on one neglected mode of authorship in the interwar period -- women's middlebrow authorship and its intersection with progressive politics. With the rise of middlebrow institutions and readers came the need for the creation of the new category of authorship. Harker contends that these new writers appropriated and adapted a larger tradition of women's activism and literary activity to their own needs and practices. Like sentimental women writers and readers of the 1850s, these authors saw fiction as a means of reforming and transforming society. Like their Progressive Era forebears, they replaced religious icons with nationalistic images of progress and pragmatic ideology. In the interwar period, this mode of authorship was informed by Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics, which insisted that art provided vicarious experience that could help create humane, democratic societies.Drawing on letters from publishers, editors, agents, and authors, America the Middlebrow traces four key moments in this distinctive culture of letters through the careers of Dorothy Canfield, Jessie Fauset, Pearl Buck, and Josephine Herbst. Both an exploration of a virtually invisible culture of letters and a challenge to monolithic paradigms of modernism, the book offers fresh insight into the ongoing tradition of political domestic fiction that flourished between the wars.

This study shows how she sought to reconcile her attachment to the Victorian past with her recognition of a new society that undermined established order and in doing so gave more opportunities to women, confused class-boundaries, extended tolerance, allowed the cult of pleasure and self-assertion and revealed the ambiguities of respectability.

This book offers an in-depth treatment of Woolf's representations of space and place. Eleven essays contribute not only to Woolf studies but also to emergent debates concerning modernism's relations to empire and geography. They offer innovative and interdisciplinary readings on topics such as London's imperial spaces and the gendering of space.

June Jordan was born on July 9, 1936, in Harlem, New York, to Mildred and Granville Jordan, Jamaican natives. During her life, she became one of the most prolific, important, and influential African American writers of her time. Before her death from breast cancer in 2002, Jordan published more than 27 books, including Some of Us Did Not Die, Solider: A Poet's Childhood, Poetry for the People: Finding a Voice through Verse, Haruko Love Poems, and Naming Our Destiny. Her work Civil Wars, a collection of letters and essays, addressed such topics as violence, homosexuality, race, and black feminism. Working in many genres and touching on many themes and issues, Jordan was a powerful force in American literature. This biography reveals the woman, the writer, the poet, the activist, the leader, and the educator in all her complexity.Working in many genres and touching on many themes and issues, June Jordan was a powerful force in American literature. This biography reveals the woman, the writer, the speaker, the poet, the activist, the leader, and the educator in all her complexity.June Jordan was born on July 9, 1936, in Harlem, New York, to Mildred and Granville Jordan, Jamaican natives. During her life, she became one of the most prolific, important, and influential African American writers of her time. Before her death from breast cancer in 2002, Jordan published more than 27 books, including Some of Us Did Not Die, Solider: A Poet's Childhood, Poetry for the People: Finding a Voice through Verse, Haruko Love Poems, and Naming Our Destiny. Her work Civil Wars, a collection of letters and essays, addressed such topics as violence, homosexuality, race, and black feminism.Kinloch offers a life and letters of this prolific writer, delving into both her biography and her contributions as a writer and activist. This approach unveils the power of language in Jordan's poems, essays, speeches, books—and ultimately in her own life—as she challenged political systems of injustice, racism, and sexism. Kinloch examines questions surrounding the pain of writing, the anger of oppression, and the struggle of African American women to assert their voices. Attention is paid to the ways in which Jordan's life informed her writings her perspectives, and her contributions to the global landscape of class, race, and gender issues. The writer's major works are explored in detail, as Kinloch weaves discussions of her life into critical considerations of her writings. Ultimately, this portrait illustrates the ways in which Jordan's career represented her dedication to making words work; her ability to rally and revolutionize the spirit of people invested in decolonization, love, and freedom; and her responsiveness to the world in which she lived.

In this study, Russell explores the ways in which Willa Cather and Toni Morrison subvert the textual expectations of gendered geography and push against the boundaries of the official canon. As Russell demonstrates, the unique depictions Cather and Morrison create of the American landscape challenge existing assertions about American fiction. Specifically, Russell argues that looking at the intimate connections between space, gender, race, and identity as they play out in the fiction of Cather and Morrison refutes the myth of a unified American landscape and thus opens up the territory of American fiction.

Sylvia Plath is one of the best-known and most widely-studied writers of the twentieth century. Since her death in 1963, critics have presented different images of Plath: the'suicidal'poet, the frustrated wife and mother, the feminist precursor.In this lively and approachable introduction to the author's poetry, Susan Bassnett offers a balanced view of Plath as one of the finest contemporary poets, and shows the diversity of her work. Bassnett's refreshing perspective on the writer provides a welcome alternative to the many studies which attempt endlessly to psychoanalyse Plath posthumously. Bassnett argues that there can never be any definitive version of the Plath story, but, from close readings of her texts, readers can discover the excitement of her diverse work. Plath is not viewed as an author driven by a death wish, nor does the book focus on her suicide - instead, she is considered in the cultural context in which she wrote, and viewed as a complex writer.Now thoroughly revised and expanded in the light of recent research, the second edition of this essential text contains new chapters and more close reading of the poetry. It concludes with an analysis of Ted Hughes'Birthday Letters, a collection of poems which he wrote about his wife after her death.

'Venturesome feminist,'historian Nancy Cott's term, perfectly describes Susan Glaspell (1876-1948), America's first important modern female playwright, winner of the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and one of the most respected novelists and short story writers of her time. In her life she explored uncharted regions and in her writing she created intrepid female characters who did the same. Born in Davenport, Iowa, just as America entered its second century, Glaspell took her cue from her pioneering grandparents as she sought to rekindle their spirit of adventure and purpose. A journalist by age eighteen, she worked her way through university as a reporter. In 1913 she and her husband, fellow Davenport iconoclast George Cram'Jig'Cook, joined the migration of writers from the Midwest to Greenwich Village, and were at the center of the first American avant-garde. Glaspell was a charter member of its important institutions--the Provincetown Players, the Liberal Club, Heterodoxy--and a close friend of John Reed, Mary Heaton Vorse, Max Eastman, Sinclair Lewis, and Eugene O'Neill. Her plays launched an indigenous American drama and addressed pressing topics such as women's suffrage, birth control, female sexuality, marriage equality, socialism, and pacifism. Although frail and ethereal, Glaspell was a determined rebel throughout her life, willing to speak out for those causes in which she believed and willing to risk societal approbation when she found love. At the age of thirty-five, she scandalized staid Davenport when she began an affair with then-married Jig Cook. After his death in Delphi, where they lived for two years, she began an eight-year relationship with a man seventeen years her junior. Youthful in appearance, she remained youthful and undaunted in spirit.'Out there--lies all that's not been touched--lies life that waits,'Claire Archer says in The Verge, Glaspell's most experimental play. The biography of Susan Glaspell is the exciting story of her personal exploration of the same terrain.

Focusing on Sexton's poems rather than on the life she led, this fresh critique of her work restarts the debate about her poetry 30 years after her death. McGowan argues that Sexton's poetry collections develop a three-way investigation into the possibilities of language to convey an individual's response to her own existence, to the project of defining love (by physical, human, and divine standards) and to the purpose of the aesthetic in our understanding of these entities. He charts the chronological development of Sexton's poetic aesthetic and provides a new interpretation of this major poet's work.Informed by the poetic and philosophical works of a number of other writers, McGowan's readings of Sexton's work are detailed and thorough. The work opens with a reconsideration of an early Sexton poem and moves through her other works in a carefully crafted fashion. He argues against the confessional interpretations of earlier readings and resituates the debate into Sexton's poetic territories, concentrating on her words, not her world. Concluding that Sexton's work challenges aesthetic and philosophical issues concerning our existence in this world and how language attempts to respond to such questions, McGowan offers a new approach and a fresh outlook on the poetry Sexton has left us.

Contextualizing theoretical debates about the political uses of gendered humor and female excess, this book explores bold new ways in which a number of contemporary Latin American women authors approach questions of identity and community. The author examines the connections among strategic uses of humor, women's bodies, and resistance in works of fiction by Laura Esquivel, Ana Lydia Vega, Luisa Valenzuela, Armonía Somers, and Alicia Borinsky. She shows how the interarticulation of the comic and comic-grotesque vision with different types of excessive female bodies can result in new configurations of female subjectivity.

Susan Glaspell in Context not only discusses the dramatic work of this key American author -- perhaps best known for her short story'A Jury of Her Peers'and its dramatic counterpart, Trifles -- but also places it within the theatrical, cultural, political, social, historical, and biographical climates in which Glaspell's dramas were created: the worlds of Greenwich Village and Provincetown bohemia, of the American frontier, and of American modernism. J. Ellen Gainor is Professor of Theatre, Women's Studies, and American Studies, Cornell University. Her other books include Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (co-edited with Jeffrey D. Mason) from the University of Michigan Press.

Zoe Akins was an artist who became successful as a Broadway playwright. For Akins, this was a hard earned title, which she achieved after years of false starts and near misses. She wrote over 40 plays, 18 of which appeared on the Broadway stage between 1919 and 1944. Also in her oeuvre are two novels, numerous short stories and essays, several film and television scripts, and two volumes of poetry. Akins constantly tried to balance her writing style so that it would suit her own moral code and simultaneously appeal to a paying audience. She was a woman in a field dominated by men, but she persevered and accomplished much including winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1935 for The Old Maid.This volume follows the progression of Akin's writing career. It primarily focuses on her Broadway plays, but also highlights other plays and writings (such as poems, film scripts, and short stories) which reflect various aspects of Akin's artistry. It will appeal to theatre, history, and women's studies scholars, as well as anyone interested in the literary career of a unique individual.