Product Description: 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...read more

Hurston was renowned for her portrayal of assertive women in her fiction, folklore, and drama. This book explores her development as an assertive woman and outspoken writer, emphasizing the impact of the African American oral traditions and vernacular speech patterns of Harlem, Polk County, and her hometown of Eatonville, Florida on the development of her personal and artistic voice. The study traces the development of her assertive women characters, the emphasis upon verbal performance and verbal empowerment, the significance of "down home" Southern humor, and the importance of an ideology of assertive individualism in Hurston's writings and analyzes changes in Hurston's personal style.Hurston articulated an assertive spirit and voice that had a profound influence on the development of her professional reputation and on the course of African American literature, folklore, and culture of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. This study combines literary criticism and biography in tracing her often controversial career. This wide-ranging book focuses upon links between Hurston's fiction and nonfiction, and includes analysis of her plays, which have often been neglected in studies of her writing.(Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York-Buffalo, 1989; revised with new introduction)

Product Description: This first-ever study of rape in modern American drama examines portrayals of rape, raped women and rapists in 36 plays written between 1970 and 2007, the period during which the feminist movement made rape a matter of public discourse...read more

Product Description: The Women's Liberation Movement held a foundational belief in the written word's power to incite social change. In this new collection, Jaime Harker and Cecilia Konchar Farr curate essays that reveal how second-wave feminists embraced this potential with a vengeance...read more

Product Description: Sequel to Herland. With Her in Ourland continues as the husband and wife tour the world outside of Herland, interviewing people, taking notes and photographs, and discussing history, religions, war, child-rearing, the role of women, treatment of immigrants, women's suffrage, and more...read more

Challenges writers such as John Irving and Harold Bloom who attack feminism for calling into question 'traditional' values and representations of the sexes.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: The spiritual dimensions in the fantastic works of both firmly established and newer writers--including such talents as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Alice Walker, Patricia Kennealy, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison and Ntozake Shange--are examined in this book...read more

Product Description: Dissatisfaction with the present can cause people to gaze nostalgically back to an idealized past; that nostalgia pervades contemporary rhetoric. In lamenting the ‘degeneracy’ of present-day America, social and literary critics as well as contemporary novelists often choose as their scapegoat the women’s movement and its increasing influence...read more

Product Description: The feminist poetry movement emerged as the women’s movement did. It flourished in writing workshops and at open readings, on the kitchen tables, of self-publishing poets/activists, at political rallies, and in the work of established women poets who began slowly to transform their ideas about formal strategies and thematic possibilities...read more

Product Description:   Black Internationalist Feminism examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely overlooked feminist tradition built upon and critically retheorized the postwar Left's "nationalist internationalism," which connected the liberation of Blacks in the United States to the liberation of Third World nations and the worldwide proletariat...read more

Product Description: During her lifetime, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was a popular writer, public speaker, and social reformer whose literary interests ranged from short stories, novels, and nonfiction philosophical studies to poetry, newspaper columns, plays, and many other genres...read more

Product Description: This close and innovative study of Edith Wharton's major novels reveals the use of increasingly complex narrative techniques to counter the multiple forces working against women writers at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Product Description: This intense examination of the writings of Tillie Olsen shows Elaine Neil Orr's deeply sympathetic passion for Olsen's literary world. Orr's objective is not simply to offer literary criticism but to interpret the subjects that inspire and disclose Olsen's spiritual vision...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite reads Frost's poetry within a theoretical perspective generated, but not limited by feminist analysis, and it evaluates Frost's persistent feminizing of poetic language in ways that he typically dramatizes as both erotic and humiliating...read more

This book focuses on the ways in which second-wave feminism has been represented in American popular culture, and on the effects that these representations have had on feminism as a political movement. Kim Loudermilk provides close readings of four best-selling novels and their film adaptations. According to Loudermilk, each of these novels contains explicitly feminist characters and themes, yet each presents a curiously ambivalent picture of feminism; these texts at once take feminism seriously and subtly undercut its most central tenets. This book argues that these texts create a kind of "fictional feminism" that recuperates feminism's radical potential, thereby lessening the threat it presents to the status quo.

This book examines the early work of William Carlos Williams in relationship to a women's tradition of American poetry, as represented by Mina Loy, Denise Levertov and Kathleen Fraser--three generations of women poets working in or directly from a modernist tradition. Linda Kinnahan traces notions of the feminine and the maternal that develop as Williams seeks to create a modern poetics. Positioning Williamas in relationship to these three generations of Anglo-American women, the book pursues two questions: what can women poets, writing with an informed awareness of Williams, teach us about his modernist poetics of contact, and just as importantly, what can they teach us about the process, for women, of constructing a self within a male-dominated tradition?

Feminist issues in avant garde poetry. In her now-classic The Pink Guitar, Rachel Blau DuPlessis examined a number of modern and contemporary poets and artists to explore the possibility of finding a language that would question deeply held assumptions about gender. In the 12 essays and introduction that constitute Blue Studios, DuPlessis continues that task, examining the work of experimental poets and the innovative forms they have fashioned to challenge commonplace assumptions about gender and cultural authority. The essays in “Attitudes and Practices” deal with two questions: what a feminist reading of cultural texts involves, and the nature of the essay itself as a mode of knowing: how poetry can be discursive and how the essay can be poetic. The goal of “Marble Paper,” with its studies of William Wordsworth, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson is to suggest terms for a “feminist history of poetry.” “Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world,” Theodore Adorno wrote, and in the section "Urrealism" DuPlessis examines the work of poets from several schools (the Objectivists, the New York School, the surrealists) whose work embodies that displacement, among them George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, H.D., and Barbara Guest. These writers’ radical deployment of line, sound, and structure, DuPlessis argues, demonstrate poetry’s power not as a purely literary, artistic, or aesthetic force but as a rhetorical form intricately tied to issues of power and ethics. And in "Migrated Into,” the author probes the ways these issues have informed her, as a poet and a critic; how the political has “migrated into” and suffused her own work; and how the practice of poetry can be an arousal to a deeper understanding of what we stand for. 

Introduces the work of American author Barbara Kingsolver and gives suggestions for incorporating it into a reading and writing curriculum.