Product Description: The field of American women's writing is one characterized by innovation: scholars are discovering new authors and works, as well as new ways of historicizing this literature, rethinking contexts, categories and juxtapositions. Now, after three decades of scholarly investigation and innovation, the rich complexity and diversity of American literature written by women can be seen with a new coherence and subtlety...read more

Product Description: Exploring a variety of writers over an array of time periods, subject matter, race and ethnicity, sexual preference, tradition, genre, and style, this volume represents the fruits ofthe dramatic and celebrated growth of the study of American women writers today...read more

Product Description: Presents critical perspectives on the works of American women poets, including Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore.

Product Description: This book offers historically-grounded, feminist interventions into American literary history by one of the country's leading scholars in American Studies. Integrating criticism, biography, social history, popular culture, and personal narrative Fishkin explores the poetry, fiction, nonfiction and drama of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century...read more

Product Description: At the turn of the twentieth century, realism meant drunken laborers participating in sordid sex and violent acts. As the century progressed, however, the workers seized the pen and forcibly changed the genre. When today's critics label realism a reactionary attempt to squelch social change, they ignore how working-class writers transformed it to fit their own interests...read more

(view table of contents)

Product Description: In Personal Property, Margit Stange analyzes white slavery literature in relation to other key American writings of the time by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Jane Addams, and Kate Chopin. The anthropological theory of the exchange of women developed by nineteenth-century anthropologists―in whose view, as Thorstein Veblen put it, woman is the original private property―informs white slavery depictions of racialized, enslaved female bodies...read more

Product Description: Looks at changing conceptions of spinsterhood in modern American culture. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Nearly every law mediates between the desire for individual liberty and the perceived necessity for maintaining social order. Literature is a powerful tool to explore jurisprudential issues and to look critically at the American legal system...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Such News of the Land shows how women nature writers used nature essays, regional sketches, fiction, and science to enlarge the audience for whom nature mattered. Approaching the subject from literary criticism, history, and anthropology, 19 contributors and the editors make a case for raising our appreciation of the role women nature writers have played in the creation of an American literature and an American identity...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: By deconstructing the gendered terms of cultural representations of the American self, this project traces the many-faceted discursive possibilities of female desire in relation to community. Begining with Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", Hester Pyrnne, a paradigm of gendered dissent, signifies the trajectory of Otherness, of a silenced singularity this work maps through to Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" and Toni Morrison's "Beloved"...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Have women finally moved beyond the status of cultural outsiders to become full participants in American poetry and its criticism? In By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry - edited by Molly McQuade - contemporary women poets reconsider their art form on their own terms, and the results are both telling and fascinating...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Sublime of Intense Sociability explores the ideology of the aesthetic known as the sublime, and the shapes it can take when in the hands of those not traditionally authorized as its subjects. The book considers how these three authors developed their own poetic strategies to claim the power of the sublime while resisting its ontological violence...read more

(view table of contents)

What if the American literary canon were expanded to consistently represent women writers, who do not always fit easily into genres and periods established on the basis of men's writings? How would the study of American literature benefit from this long-needed revision? This timely collection of essays by fourteen women writers breaks new ground in American literary study. Not content to rediscover and awkwardly "fit" female writers into the "white male" scheme of anthologies and college courses, editors Margaret Dickie and Joyce W. Warren question the current boundaries of literary periods, advocating a revised literary canon. The essays consider a wide range of American women writers, including Mary Rowlandson, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Frances Harper, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell and Adrienne Rich, discussing how the present classification of these writers by periods affects our reading of their work.Beyond the focus of feminist challenges to American literary periodization, this volume also studies issues of a need for literary reforms considering differences in race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. The essays are valuable and informative as individual critical studies of specific writers and their works. Challenging Boundaries presents intelligent, original, well-written, and practical arguments in support of long-awaited changes in American literary scholarship and is a milestone of feminist literary study. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Compelling essays which underline the central place pregnancy and childbirth hold in women’s writing. Embracing three centuries of prose and poetry, the anthology traces the evolution of American maternity literature, exploring the difficulties mothers faced as they struggled to transform themselves from objects into maternal subjects...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

(view table of contents)

Product Description: In spite of the recovery of numerous women writers and the reconceptualizations of American literature since the 1980s, literary criticism has been slow to bring 19th-century male and female writers, so-called masculine and feminine traditions, together in dialogue...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

(view table of contents)

Explores the influences of Minny Temple and Constance Fenimore Woolson on Henry James' life