Women's Literature
- Women's LiteratureSomewhere around 1970 new courses, and new constituencies for them, began to appear on American university campuses. Reflecting—and demanding attention to—concerns targeted by the political activism that would soon result in the formation of, among other things, women's studies and black studies programs, these courses can be said to have marked a watershed in thinking about what makes a university curriculum and even about the way in which knowledge is constituted. In the gender vanguard came courses in women's history and in women's literature. Initially these areas of study tended to be developed outside the usual curricular channels, the result more often than not of students and faculty members coming together on their own with mutual interests and making available what had for so long been absent from literary canons: the women who had been writing, publishing, and stirring things up all along. Little by little whole programs of study were developed—usually through pressure put on campus administrations and sometimes by the tried-and-true method of simply occupying space and refusing to leave. The study of women's literature and women in literature owes its existence to grassroots political activism, academic style.
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Perspectives
Journalistas
Since their emergence as a journalistic force after the world wars, women have continued to break new ground in newspapers and magazines, redefining the world as we see it as well as the craft as it applied. Many of the pieces in Journalistas feel almost unsettlingly relevant today,the conclusions Emma "Red" Goldman drew in her 1916, "the Social Aspects of Birth Control," Maddy Vegtel's 1930s article about becoming pregnant at forty, and Eleanor Roosevelt's call for greater tolerance after America's race riots in 1943. Many have pushed other limits: Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth brought feminism to a new generation Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones caused a media revolution: Ruth Picardie's unflinchingly honest column about living with cancer in 1997 brought a wave of British candour and a host of imitators and when two iconic women come face to face, we have at one end, Dorothy Parker on Isadora Duncan (1928), and at the other, Julie Burchill on Margaret Thatcher (2004).
Women Writing Africa
Part I: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries; Part II: The Early Twentieth Century (1900-1935); Part III: The Mid-Twentieth Century (1936-1969); Part IV: Late Twentieth Century (1970-1995); Part V: Into the Twenty-first Century (1996-2004).
Invented Lives
Concentrating on carefully chosen selections from ten writers, Mary Helen Washington explores the work, the realities, and the hopes of black women writers between 1860 and 1960. Featuring works by Harriet Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline E. Hopkins, Fannie Barrier Williams, Marita O. Bonner, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Dorothy West, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Praise for Invented Lives "Mary Helen Washington has done more than any other single critic to expand the Afro-American and Anglo-American feminist canons."--The Women's Review of Books "This collection is, in fact, two fine books in one: at once an anthology and a critical study."--New York Times Book Review "The forceful, uncompromising, and distinctive voice of Mary Helen Washington brings together foremothers and daughters . . . in a volume that presents . . . a century of black women's writing along with a vital new tradition of black feminist criticism."--Marianne Hirsch, Ms. Magazine
Women Writers in Renaissance England
Of all the new developments in literary theory, feminism has proved to be the most widely influential, leading to an expansion of the traditional English canon in all periods of study. This book aims to make the work of Renaissance women writers in English better known to general and academic readers so as to strengthen the case for their future inclusion in the Renaissance literary canon. This lively book surveys women writers in the sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries. Its selection is vast, historically representative, and original, taking examples from twenty different, relatively unknown authors in all genres of writing, including poetry, fiction, religious works, letters and journals, translation, and books on childcare. It establishes new contexts for the debate about women as writers within the period and suggests potential intertextual connections with works by well-known male authors of the same time. Individual authors and works are given concise introductions, with both modern and historical critical analysis, setting them in a theoretical and historicised context. All texts are made readily accessible through modern spelling and punctuation, on-the-page annotation and headnotes. The substantial, up-to-date bibliography provides a source for further study and research.
It's a Woman's World
Sixty poems by fifty-five different twentieth-century women poets have been selected in this remarkable anthology celebrating the power and strength of women. Drawing from poets both familiar (Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath) and less well known, this collection traces women's diverse experiences through the turbulent years of this century and represents voices from many different cultures, including Native American, African-American, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Nigerian. Quirky, moving, surprising, amusing--these poems let women speak for themselves about love and war, work and play, marriage and family, power and ambition. With striking black-and-white photographs, a preface, and a handy index of titles and first lines, this elegant compilation makes an ideal gift for poetry lovers and women's history buffs.
American Women Writers To 1800
American Women Writers to 1800 advances our knowledge of early American culture. Including works by more than ninety women, many of whom have never before been published, this ambitious anthology captures the cultural and individual diversity of women's experiences in early America. It bothcomplements and extends earlier studies of colonial and Revolutionary America, with writings that observe the natural features and resources of the "New World"; the proliferation of religious movements; racial relations between Native Americans, African Americans, and European settlers; andpatriotic and loyalist sympathies during the Revolutionary years. Selections also confront distinctly feminist issues, focusing on women's education; the psychological complexities of girlhood, marriage and childbirth; sexuality; the legal status of women; and the rise of feminist philosophies atthe end of the eighteenth century. Along with better known Massachusetts writers such as Bradstreet, Rowlandson, and Knight, this collection presents works by authors from other New England, mid-Atlantic, and southern colonies, by African American and Native American women, and by women who exploredthe frontier regions. An impressive variety of genres is represented, with extensive selections of memoirs, letters, diaries, poetry, captivity narratives, Native American narratives, essays, sermons, autobiographies, novels, dramas, and scientific and political tracts. Brief biographicalintroductions to each author, explanatory footnotes, and a comprehensive index and bibliography impress modern scholarship upon this valuable literary collection and offer fertile ground for a radical rethinking of early American women's lives and writings, while challenging our assumptionsregarding early America itself.
The Fiction of Enlightenment: women of reason in the French eighteenth century
"This book argues that women authors of the French eighteenth century claimed reason and contributed to Enlightenment. It begins by framing the Enlightenment as fiction, in two senses: first, what passes under the name of Enlightenment in much current critical discourse is a fiction, or a caricatured construct; second, works of fiction can illuminate Enlightenment. The book offers fresh readings of texts by the three most prominent women among eighteenth-century writers in French: Francoise de Graffigny, Marie Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de Charriere, These authors challenged the widely held idea that women's reason was inferior to men's. Literary forms - novels, stories, plays, essays, and letters - allowed these authors to approach the question of reason in particularly nuanced ways
British Women Poets of the Romantic Era
During the Romantic period, women such as Joanna Baillie, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Robinson, Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Tighe were among the most highly respected and widely read practitioners of the art of poetry. In fact, Hemans was one of the bestselling authors of the nineteenth century, and Baillie was the foremost playwright of her time. In British Women Poets of the Romantic Era, Paula R. Feldman introduces modern readers to the range and diversity of women's poetic expression, making available more texts by more women poets of the Romantic era than have ever been collected in a single book in the twentieth century. Feldman provides detailed introductions for each of the sixty-two poets, chronicling their lives, poetic careers, and critical reputations. This groundbreaking volume not only documents the richness of their literary contributions but also changes our thinking about the poetry of the English Romantic period.
Water Lillies
An anthology of Spanish women writers from the fifteenth through the nineteenth century. Water Lilies brings to light a rich & until now, largely invisible version of Spanish literary history. These hard-to-find works, most translated for the first time, are printed on facing pages in Spanish & English & are located within a critical, biographical & historical overview.
Famous Female Writers
- Allende, Isabel1942–, Chilean novelist. Since the 1973 coup that deposed her cousin, President Salvador Allende Gossens, Isabel Allende, who is among the most notable contemporary Chilean writers, has lived abroad, for many years in California. Her fiction is distinguished by its fusion of traditional realism with both the fantastic and with political (including feminist) concerns. Her first and best-known novel, The House of Spirits (1982, tr. 1985), which reflects the influence of Gabriel García Márquez and the technique of magic realism (her work has been called “magical feminism” by some critics), tells the story of a Chilean family over three generations. Allende's fiction also includes Of Love and Shadows (1984, tr. 1987); Eva Luna (1987, tr. 1988); The Infinite Plan (1991, tr. 1993), her first work set in the United States; Daughter of Fortune (1998, tr. 1999); Portrait in Sepia (2001); Inés of My Soul (2006), the fictionalized life of a 16th-century conquistadora; and Island beneath the Sea (2010), a tale of the 18th-century Haitian slave revolution.
- Angelou, Maya b. 4 April 1928, St. Louis, MissouriA. is an extremely prolific black American woman writer whose greatest achievement is her series of autobiographical novels in which the A. persona moves from age three to her mid-thirties, from 1928 to the mid-1960s. Published in 1970, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was followed by Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). A. has also written lyric poetry that has been published in several volumes: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971); Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975); And Still I Rise (1978); Shaker Why Don’t You Sing? (1983); Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987, with art by Tom Feelings); and I Shall Not Be Moved (1990). Generally, this poetry is of less interest than A.'s other work. She has also accomplished much in drama, having produced, directed, and written a number of plays and screenplays. In addition to all of these achievements, A. has been a successful dancer, singer, and university teacher. Part of her importance is clearly the verve, creativity, and drive that she has displayed in so many different creative roles.
- Austen, JaneThe English writer Jane Austen (1775-1817) was one of the most important novelists of the 19th century.
In her intense concentration on the thoughts and feelings of a limited number of characters, Jane Austen creates as profound an understanding and as precise a vision of the potentialities of the human spirit as the art of fiction has ever achieved. Although her novels received favorable reviews, she was not celebrated as an author during her lifetim - Christie, [Dame] Agatha b. 15 September 1890, Torquay; d. 12 January 1976, WallingfordOne of the most translated writers in the English language, Christie is the acknowledged master practitioner of the “whodunit” form of mystery as it developed after World War I. Her seventy-eight novels, 150 short stories, and nineteen plays all feature ingeniously constructed plots concerning crime and its detection, and continue to enjoy not only worldwide popularity but also increasing critical respect.
- Dickinson, Emily 1830 - 1886American poet. One of the great lyric poets of the English language, Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, a New England college town where her father was a prominent local lawyer. Highly educated for a woman of her era, Dickinson studied a modern curriculum of English and the sciences at Amherst Academy, then attended newly founded Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (later Mount Holyoke College) for a year before returning to Amherst, where she lived for the rest of her life, aside from short journeys. The informed, questioning intelligence and fearless emotional analysis of Dickinson's poetry contrast with a personal reticence that became reclusiveness: 'The Soul selects – her own Society' (c. 1862).
- Lee, (Nelle) Harper (1926–2016)US writer. Her novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), a story of racial prejudice in America's Deep South, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and became an enduring classic. The film version, made in 1962, won three Academy Awards. Lee worked as a consultant on the screenplay adaptation of the novel. Over 50 years later, in 2015, a ‘second’ Lee novel, Go Set a Watchman was published, although this is largely regarded as a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird rather than a sequel.
- Tan, AmyAmerican novelist, short story writer, children's book writer
Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She grew up very conscious of her Asian appearance among her Caucasian schoolmates. Tan graduated from San Jose State University with a B.A. in 1973 and an M.A. in 1974, got married, and, after three years of postgraduate study at University of California, Berkeley, became a successful business writer. This work did not satisfy her, and she turned to fiction, producing her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), and achieving virtually instant success as a major new voice in contemporary literature. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Joy Luck Club, the story of four Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters, explores generational conflicts that center on the degree to which mothers and daughters assimilate American culture. The social club fosters the solidarity of these women, even though they have different orientations toward their communities.
21 Top Women Writers Who Literally Changed the World
- 21 Top Women Writers Who Literally Changed the WorldThese days it’s not unusual to see women at the top of the best sellers lists or winning Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes. But some women writers just stand out from the crowd, prize-winners or not. Their words have a profound and lasting effect on their contemporary generation and continue to resound for future readers.
Works by Female Writers
Jane Eyre
Orphaned into the household of her Aunt Reed at Gateshead and subject to the cruel regime at Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre nonetheless emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity. She takes up the post of governess at Thornfield Hall, falls in love with Mr. Rochester, and discovers the impediment to their lawful marriage in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman's passionate search for a richer life than that traditionally allowed women in Victorian society. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Mason
The Mill on the Floss
Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen-name of George Eliot, wrote this novel in 1860. This was one of Evans' most autobiographical novels, with Maggie Tulliver based on herself, Tom Tulliver based on her own older brother, and Mr. Tulliver based on her father.
Tar Baby
Ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary, Tar Baby is Toni Morrison's reinvention of the love story. Jadine Childs is a black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
The God of Small Things
The beloved debut novel about an affluent Indian family forever changed by one fateful day in 1969, from the author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * MAN BOOKER PRIZE WINNER Compared favorably to the works of Faulkner and Dickens, Arundhati Roy's modern classic is equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama. The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevocably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. It is an event that will lead to an illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional, exposing "big things [that] lurk unsaid" in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest. Lush, lyrical, and unnerving, The God of Small Things is an award-winning landmark that started for its author an esteemed career of fiction and political commentary that continues unabated. Praise for The God of Small Things "Dazzling . . . as subtle as it is powerful."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "[The God of Small Things] offers such magic, mystery, and sadness that, literally, this reader turned the last page and decided to reread it. Immediately. It's that haunting."--USA Today "The quality of Ms. Roy's narration is so extraordinary--at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple--that the reader remains enthralled all the way through."--The New York Times Book Review "A novel of real ambition must invent its own language, and this one does."--John Updike, The New Yorker "Outstanding. A glowing first novel."--Newsweek "Splendid and stunning."--The Washington Post Book World
The Night Watchman
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich's grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman. Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new "emancipation" bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn't about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a "termination" that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans "for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run"? Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice's shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn't been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life. Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice's best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.
Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, and Other Writings (LOA #57)
Willa Cather, one of the great American novelists of the 20th century, also wrote some of America's best short fiction. From her haunting first story, "Peter," the tale of a Bohemian immigrant who brought his violin to the raw western frontier, to her posthumously published "The Best Years," the stories included here span the fifty years of Cather's writing life. In these tales of pioneers and farmers, artists and youthful lovers, immigrants and their striving children, she creates both a new, never-surpassed portrait of the land and people of the American West and a lively and contemporary picture of life in eastern cities. Many of her finest stories, among them "Coming, Aphrodite!"--a New York tale of passion and ambition--and the subtly constructed "Old Mrs. Harris," are unfamiliar to most readers. Her earliest, uncollected stories are steeped in memories of prairie childhood. Her earliest, uncollected stories are steeped in memories of prairie childhood. "On the Divide," "The Enchanted Bluff," "Eric Hermannson's Soul," and others contain many of the themes of her later work, evoking the loneliness and hardship as well as the beauty and challenge of pioneer life "on the bright edges of the world." In the stories of Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920), which includes "The Sculptor's Funeral," "The Diamond Mine," and the well-known "Paul's Case," artists and other sensitive spirits struggle to preserve their integrity in a society ruled by convention and routine. Obscure Destinies (1932) presents three moving tales set in the western landscapes Cather loved. Her characters are endowed with some of the meditative solidity found in the portraits of Rembrandt, like the old farmer in "Neighbour Rosicky" who has only "one tap root that goes down deep." The Old Beauty and Others (1948), published shortly after Cather's death, includes "The Best Years," a Nebraska story that has a mournful charm unlike anything else she wrote. Cather's distinctive, lyrical prose can be found not only in her fiction but also in her "occasional" pieces--an appreciation of Sarah Orne Jewett, luminous reminiscences of Mrs. James Fields and her house in Boston, an account of meeting Flaubert's niece in Aix-les-Bains. Her critical essays, such as "The Novel Démeublé" and "On the Art of Fiction," which appear in Not Under Forty (1936), and her reviews of authors from Mark Twain to Frank Norris, as well as her appraisals of her own work, cast a discerning light on the creative role of the artist. This volume also contains Cather's first novella, Alexander's Bridge (1912), My Mortal Enemy (1926), a powerful novella in which a strong-willed woman brings about her own ruin, and Cather's only book of poetry, April Twilights and Other Poems (1933).
The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin
Declared worthless and dehumanizing by James Baldwin in 1949, Uncle Tom's Cabin has lacked literary credibility for fifty years. Now, in a ringing refutation of Baldwin, Henry Louis Gates Jr. demonstrates the literary transcendence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's masterpiece. Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published in 1852, galvanized the American public as no other work of fiction has ever done. The editors animate pre-Civil War life with rich insights into the lives of slaves, abolitionists, and the American reading public. Examining the lingering effects of the novel, they provide new insights into emerging race-relation, women's, gay, and gender issues. With reproductions of rare prints, posters, and photographs, this book is also one of the most thorough anthologies of Uncle Tom images up to the present day.