Product Description: Post-9/11 Representations of Arab Men by Arab American Women Writers: Affirmation and Resistance examines the portrayals of Arab masculinities in novels published after September 11, 2001, by women of Arab descent in the United States...read more

Product Description: Examining the appropriations and revisions of Indian identity first carried out by Anglo-American engravers and later by early Anglo-American women writers, Cathy Rex shows the ways in which iconic images of Native figures inform not only an emerging colonial/early republican American identity but also the authorial identity of white women writers...read more

Product Description: In this innovative new study, Laura Halperin examines literary representations of harm inflicted on Latinas’ minds and bodies, and on the places Latinas inhabit, but she also explores how hope can be found amid so much harm. Analyzing contemporary memoirs and novels by Irene Vilar, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ana Castillo, Cristina García, and Julia Alvarez, she argues that the individual harm experienced by Latinas needs to be understood in relation to the collective histories of aggression against their communities...read more

The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers considers the important literary, historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts of American women authors from the seventeenth century to the present and provides readers with an analysis of current literary trends and debates in women’s literature. This accessible and engaging guide covers a variety of essential topics, such as: the transatlantic and transnational origins of American women's literary traditions the colonial period and the Puritans the early national period and the rhetoric of independence the nineteenth century and the Civil War the twentieth century, including modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights era trends in twenty-first century American women's writing feminism, gender and sexuality, regionalism, domesticity, ethnicity, and multiculturalism. The volume examines the ways in which women writers from diverse racial, social, and cultural backgrounds have shaped American literary traditions, giving particular attention to the ways writers worked inside, outside, and around the strictures of their cultural and historical moments to create space for women’s voices and experiences as a vital part of American life. Addressing key contemporary and theoretical debates, this comprehensive overview presents a highly readable narrative of the development of literature by American women and offers a crucial range of perspectives on American literary history.

Product Description: In Thinking Outside the Book, Augusta Rohrbach works through the increasing convergences between digital humanities and literary studies to explore the meaning and primacy of the book as a literary, material, and cultural artifact...read more

Product Description: This is an important contribution to scholarship on late nineteenth-century American women writers. Hausmann describes how female characters in literary environments operate literally and symbolically to reveal conceptual complexities that challenge traditional notions about women and how their attitudes toward cultural and social influences shape women's lives...read more

This book traces the development of a Left feminist consciousness as women became more actively involved in the American Left during and immediately following World War II. McDonald argues that women writers on the Left drew on the rhetoric of antifascism to critique the cultural and ideological aspects of women’s oppression. In Left journals during World War II, women writers outlined the dangers of fascist control for women and argued that the fight against fascism must also be about ending women’s oppression. After World War II, women writers continued to use this antifascist framework to call attention to the ways in which the emerging domestic ideology in the United States bore a frightening resemblance to the fascist repression of women in Nazi Germany.This critique of American domestic ideology emphasized the ways in which black and working-class women were particularly affected and extended to an examination of women’s roles in personal and romantic relationships. Underlying this critique was the belief that representations of women in American culture were part of the problem. To counter these dominant cultural images, women writers on the Left depicted female activists in contemporary antifascist and anticolonial struggles or turned to the past, for historical role models in the labor, abolitionist, and antisuffrage movements. This depiction of women as models of agency and liberation challenged some of the conventions about femininity in the postwar era.The book provides a historical overview of women writers who anticipated issues about women’s oppression and the intersections of gender, race, and class that would become central tenants of feminist literary criticism and black feminist criticism in the 1970s and 1980s. It closely considers works by writers both well-known and obscure, including Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Martha Dodd, Sanora Babb, and Beth McHenry.

Product Description: Looking at works by Carrie Mae Weems, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, Carson McCullers, and Zora Neale Hurston, Claire Raymond uncovers a pattern of femininity constructed around representations of sadistic violence in American women's literature and photography from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries...read more