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Pacific Northwest Women, 1815-1925
Lives, Memories, and Writings
Jean M. Ward
Oregon State University Press, 1995

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Panic Fiction
Women and Antebellum Economic Crisis
Mary Templin
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Panic Fiction explores a unique body of antebellum American women’s writing that illuminates women’s relationships to the marketplace and the links between developing ideologies of domesticity and the formation of an American middle class.

Between the mid-1830s and the late 1850s, authors such as Hannah Lee, Catharine Sedgwick, Eliza Follen, Maria McIntosh, and Maria Cummins wrote dozens of novels and stories depicting the effects of financial panic on the home and proposing solutions to economic instability. This unique body of antebellum American women’s writing, which integrated economic discourse with the language and conventions of domestic fiction, is what critic Mary Templin terms “panic fiction.”

In Panic Fiction: Antebellum Women Writers and Economic Crisis, Templin draws in part from the methods of New Historicism and cultural studies, situating these authors and their texts within the historical and cultural contexts of their time. She explores events surrounding the panics of 1837 and 1857, prevalent attitudes toward speculation and failure as seen in newspapers and other contemporaneous texts, women’s relationships to the marketplace, and the connections between domestic ideology and middle-class formation.

Although largely unknown today, the phenomena of “panic fiction” was extremely popular in its time and had an enormous influence on nineteenth-century popular conceptions of speculation, failure, and the need for marketplace reform, providing a distinct counterpoint to the analysis of panic found in newspapers, public speeches, and male-authored literary texts of the time.
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Phyllis Shand Allfrey
A Caribbean Life
Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth
Rutgers University Press, 1996
Phyllis Shand Allfrey is the first biography of one of the Caribbean's most intriguing writers and politicians. Allfrey (1908-1986) is best known as the author of The Orchid House, a fictionalized account of her early life that was turned into a highly acclaimed film for British television. Born to a prominent family of formerly wealthy sugar planters in Dominica, Allfrey followed an unexpected path: a rising novelist (who is often paired with Jean Rhys in critical discussion) and Fabian socialist in England and the United States, she returned to Dominica to organize the peasantry and estate workers into the island's first political party. Ostracized by the white elite into which she was born, she led the Dominica Labour party to power and became the West Indian Federation's only woman (and only white) minister, only to find herself expelled from the party when the rise of black nationalism made it expedient. The biography recreates Allfrey's life as it unfolds against the background of twentieth-century Caribbean political and literary history, from the decline of the planter class through the rise of party politics and the efforts to join the anglophone West Indies into a federation, to the troubled sixties and seventies, decades marked by racial violence and the emergence of the former British territories from colonial control. This volume includes five autobiographical stories that have long been out of print.
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The Pink Guitar
Writing as Feminist Practice
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
University of Alabama Press, 2006
An influential feminist study of poetry and writing
 
The Pink Guitar is a landmark study of women's writing and poetics—and representations of women artists—in the 20th century. It probes the work of H.D., William Carlos Williams, and Marcel Duchamp, among others, and includes DuPlessis’s pioneering essay “For the Etruscans,” described in American Literature as “one of the finest pieces of criticism in the feminist literary tradition.”

 

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Place Matters
Morgan, Susan
Rutgers University Press, 1996

"Morgan has written an important and original work that presents a well-substantiated challenge to many recent studies of 'colonial discourse'."--Nancy L. Paxton,

Susan Morgan's study of materials and regions, previously neglected in contemporary postcolonial studies, begins with the transforming premise that "place matters." Concepts derived from writings about one area of the world cannot simply be transposed to another area, in some sort of global theoretical move. Moreover, place in the discourse of Victorian imperialism is a matter of gendered as well as geographic terms. Taking up works by Anna Forbes and Marianne North on the Malay Archipelago, by Margaret Brooke and Harriette McDougall on Sarawak, by Isabella Bird and Emily Innes on British Malaya, by Anna Leonowens on Siam, Morgan also makes extensive use of theorists whose work on imperialism in Southeast Asia is unfamiliar to most American academics.

This vivid examination of a different region and different writings emphasizes that in Victorian literature there was no monolithic imperialist location, authorial or geographic. The very notion of a ‘colony’ or an ‘imperial presence’ in Southeast Asia is problematic. Morgan is concerned with marking the intersections of particular Victorian imperial histories and constructions of subjectivity. She argues that specific places in Southeast Asia have distinctive, and differing, masculine imperial rhetorics. It is within these specific rhetorical contexts that women’s writings, including their moments of critique, can be read.

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Playing House in the American West
Western Women's Life Narratives, 1839–1987
Cathryn Halverson
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Examines an eclectic group of western women’s autobiographical texts—canonical and otherwise—Playing House in the American West argues for a distinct regional literary tradition characterized by strategic representations of unconventional domestic life  

The controlling metaphor Cathryn Halverson uses in her engrossing study is “playing house.”  From Caroline Kirkland and Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, western authors have persistently embraced wayward or eccentric housekeeping to prove a woman’s difference from western neighbors and eastern readers alike. 

The readings in Playing House investigate the surprising textual ends to which westerners turn the familiar terrain of the home: evaluating community; arguing for different conceptions of race and class; and perhaps most especially, resisting traditional gender roles.  Western women writers, Halverson argues, render the home as a stage for autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather than as a site of sacrifice and obligation.

The western women examined in Playing House in the American West are promoted and read as representatives of a region, as insiders offering views of distant and intriguing ways of life, even as they conceive of themselves as outsiders. By playing with domestic conventions, they recast the region they describe, portraying the West as a place that fosters female agency, individuality, and subjectivity.
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Playing the Other
Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature
Froma I. Zeitlin
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Relations between the sexes was a pervasive concern of ancient Greek thought and literature, extending from considerations of masculine and feminine roles in domestic and political spheres to the organization of the cosmos in a pantheon of gods and goddesses. In Playing the Other Froma Zeitlin explores the diversity and complexity of these interactions through the most influential literary texts of the archaic and classical periods ranging from epic (Homer) and didactic poetry (Hesiod) to the theatrical productions of tragedy and comedy in fifth-century Athens.

Zeitlin demonstrates the indispensable workings of gender as a major factor in Greek social, religious, and cultural practices and in more abstract ideas about nature and culture, public and private, citizen and outsider, self and other, and mortal and immortal. Focusing on the prominence of female figures in these male authored texts, she enlarges our perspective on critical components of political order and civic identity by including issues of sexuality, the body, modes of male and female maturation, and speculations about parentage, kinship, and reproductive strategies. Along with considerations of genre, poetics, and theatrical mimesis, she points to the powerful mythmaking capacities of Greek culture for creating memorable paradigms and dramatic scenarios that far exceed simple notions of male and female opposition and predictable enforcement of social norms. Consisting of both new and revised essays, Playing the Other is a wide-ranging account of a central category of Greek literature by a scholar who pioneered an approach to classics through the perspective of gender.
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The Pleasure of Miss Pym
By Charles Burkhart
University of Texas Press, 1987

When British writers Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil named Barbara Pym one of the twentieth century's most underrated authors in a 1977 Times Literary Supplement survey, they started a Barbara Pym revival that continued unabated in Great Britain and the United States. Barbara Pym's delightful tales of jumble sales and parish meetings, her ironic insights into the relationships between women and men, have won a devoted following. Indeed she is often compared to that most accomplished author of comedies of manners, Jane Austen.

The Pleasure of Miss Pym is a critical study of Pym as comic writer and of the links between her life and autobiographical writings and her fiction, written with a liveliness of style and tone that matches Pym's own. Not only does Charles Burkhart provide perceptive discussions of Pym's life and novels, he also illuminates the worldview represented in her work, the unique nature of her comedy, her religion, her place within the history of the novel, and her penetrating insights into male-female relationships. All of Pym's work, including the 1986 posthumous publication, An Academic Question, is intelligently surveyed here. Scholars of contemporary English literature will derive both instruction and pleasure from this elegantly written study, as will Pym's admiring readers, for whom it is also intended.

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Poetics Of Enclosure
American Women Poets From Dickinson To Dove
Leslie Wheeler
University of Tennessee Press, 2002
In this illuminating critical study, Lesley Wheeler argues for a women’s tradition in American poetry lyric poetry characterized by figures of enclosure. She examines how six dissimilar yet interconnected poets employ this idiom: Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, and Rita Dove.

As Wheeler notes, the terms “closed” and “open” have long posed problems for poets and scholars. Addressing such controversies, the author offers three meanings for enclosure: formal confinement, reserve or privacy in both style and content, and a central dependency on imagery of narrow spaces. She finds that Brooks does not exercise “privacy” in the same manner as Dickinson or H.D. and that Moore’s conception of poetic form contrasts sharply with those of Bishop and Dove. Nevertheless, Wheeler asserts, these authors demonstrate a common approach to the lyric that constitutes a central and overlooked mode of American poetry.

In charting the history of an evolving and flexible poetic strategy, The Poetics of Enclosure also argues for the continuing relevance of lyric as a category. While the poets treated here all mount challenges to lyric definition, they also work in crucial relation to its traditions. All conceive of the lyric in terms of rhythmic and/or visual patterns; all allude to the metaphor of voice; and, in particular, all emphasize the boundaries between private and public that the lyric highlights. Where figures of enclosure appear, Wheeler argues, these poets not only illuminate their poetic practice but also, after Dickinson, acknowledge in shorthand their female peers and predecessors.

The Author: Lesley Wheeler is associate professor of English at Washington and Lee University. She has published essays and reviews in the African American Review, Callaloo, Critical Matrix, and other journals. Her poetry has appeared in such publications as American Writing, Northeast Journal, and American Standard.
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A Poetics of Resistance
Women Writing in El Salvador, South Africa, and the United States
Mary DeShazer
University of Michigan Press, 1994
The recent critical works that look at literature as a weapon of resistance have frequently neglected the genre of poetry, particularly the poetry of Third World women writers. A Poetics of Resistance is the first book-length examination of poetry written by woman of El Salvador, South Africa, and the United States and the ways it bears witness to political struggle and produces new kinds of knowledge.
 
Engaging the works of critics such as Chandra Mohanty, Barbara Harlow, Claribel Alegria, Albie Sachs, and Audre Lorde, among others, Mary DeShazer reconceptualizes traditional notions of resistance and literature and the relationship between them. She argues that women’s voices have been underrepresented in previous analyses of Third World resistance poetry, and that when examined collectively, their work reveals overtly gendered concerns that distinguish it from that of their male counterparts.
 
DeShazer defines resistance as an active quest for justice and a means of collective empowerment. She looks at the diasporic consciousness of exiled and dislocated women, examines the tensions between claims of identity and claims of difference, and explores the ways in which gender and struggle connect women across nationalities and historical imperatives. Her analysis of Salvadoran and South African women’s poetry reveal the ways in which poetic conventions can be seen as “political declarations of privilege,” casting a new light on women’s resistance poetry in the United States.
 
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Poetry Matters
Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics
Heather Milne
University of Iowa Press, 2018

Poetry Matters explores poetry written by women from the United States and Canada, which documents the social and political turmoil of the early twenty-first century and places this poetry in dialogue with recent currents of feminist theory including new materialism, affect theory, posthumanism, and feminist engagements with neoliberalism and capitalism. Central to this project is the conviction that a poetics that explores the political dimensions of affect; demonstrates an understanding of subjectivity as posthuman and transcorporeal; critically reflects on the impact of capitalism on queer, racialized, and female bodies; and develops an ethical vocabulary for reimagining the nation state and critically engaging with issues of democracy and citizenship is now more urgent than ever before. 

Milne focuses on poetry published after 2001 by writers who mostly began writing after the feminist writing movements of the 1980s, but who have inherited and built upon their political and aesthetic legacies. The poets discussed in this book—including Jennifer Scappettone, Margaret Christakos, Larissa Lai, Rita Wong, Nikki Reimer, Rachel Zolf, Yedda Morrison, Marcella Durand, Evelyn Reilly, Juliana Spahr, Claudia Rankine, Dionne Brand, Jena Osman, and Jen Benka—bring a sense of political agency to poetry. These voices seek new vocabularies and dissenting critical and aesthetic frameworks for thinking across issues of gender, materiality, capitalism, the toxic convergences of nationalism and racism, and the decline of democratic institutions. This is poetry that matters—both in its political urgency and in its attentiveness to the world as “matter”—as a material entity under siege. It could not be more timely or more relevant. 

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A Poet's Truth
Conversations with Latino/Latina Poets
Bruce Allen Dick
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Among students and aficionados of contemporary literature, the work of Latina and Latino poets holds a particular fascination. Through works imbued with fire and passion, these writers have kindled new enthusiasm in their compatriots and admiration in non-Latino readers. This book brings together recent interviews with fifteen Latino/a poets, a cross-section of Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban voices who discuss not only their work but also related issues that help define their place in American literature. Each talks at length about the craft of his or her poetry—both the influences and the process behind it—and takes a stand on social and political issues affecting Latinos across the United States.

The interviews feature both established writers published as early as the 1960s and emerging artists, each of whom has enjoyed success in other literary forms also. As Bruce Dick's insightful questions reveal, the key threads linking these writers are their connections to their families and communities and their concern for civil rights—believing like Chicana writer Pat Mora that "the work of the poet is for the people." The interviews also reveal diversity among and within the three communities, from Victor Hernández Cruz, who traces Latino collective identity to Africa and claims that all Latinos are "swimming in olive oil," to Cuban writer Gustavo Perez Firmat, who considers nationality more important than ethnicity and says that "the term Latino erases [his] nationality."

The dialogues also offer new insights on the place of Chicano/a writings in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, on the Puerto Rican/Nuyorican establishment, and on the anti-Castro stand of Cuban-born poets. As these writers answer questions about their work, background, ethnic identity, and political ideology, they provide a wealth of biographical, intellectual, and literary material collected here for the first time. A Poet's Truth is a provocative and revealing book that not only conveys the fire of these writers' passions but also sheds important light on a whole literary movement.

Interviews with:

Miguel Algarín
Martín Espada
Sandra María Esteves
Victor Hernández Cruz
Carolina Hospital and Carlos Medina
Demetria Martínez
Pat Mora
Judith Ortiz Cofer
Ricardo Pau-Llosa
Gustavo Pérez Firmat
Leroy Quintana
Aleida Rodríguez
Luis Rodríguez
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Virgil Suárez
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Politicizing Gender
Narrative Strategies in the Aftermath of the French Revolution
Kadish, Doris Y
Rutgers University Press, 1991
It is Doris Kadish's contention in this book that gender and politics went hand-in-hand in the nineteenth century; that nineteenth-century works can often be read as retellings of the French Revolution; and that the political meanings of these works can be gleaned through the study of narrative strategies that she chooses to call "semiotic readings." Building on the work of Marina Warner, Lynn Hunt, Joan Landes, Nancy Armstrong, Foucault and others, she shows how the strategy of politicizing gender during and after the revolution served many functions--among them to articulate representations of revolution, to form the nineteenth-century public sphere, to constitute bourgeois ideology, to distance the unruly masses, and ultimately, perhaps, to express a deep seated fear of women as a threat to the status quo.     Looking at the French and English novel, and even selected relevant paintings in this way, she is able to read much-read texts in new and refreshing ways. She shows us how a collective story or master narrative of the revolution was retold and refashioned throughout the century, even where we might least expect to find it. She looks first at small details in order to see the larger patterns, and is among the first to show us how semiotics may make a contribution to gender studies.
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The Politics of the Female Body
Postcolonial Women Writers
Ketu H. Katrak
Rutgers University Press, 2006

Is it possible to simultaneously belong to and be exiled from a community? In Politics of the Female Body, Ketu H. Katrak argues that it is not only possible, but common, especially for women who have been subjects of colonial empires.

Through her careful analysis of postcolonial literary texts, Katrak uncovers the ways that the female body becomes a site of both oppression and resistance. She examines writers working in the English language, including Anita Desai from India, Ama Ata Aidoo from Ghana, and Merle Hodge from Trinidad, among others. The writers share colonial histories, a sense of solidarity, and resistance strategies in the on-going struggles of decolonization that center on the body.

Bringing together a rich selection of primary texts, Katrak examines published novels, poems, stories, and essays, as well as activist materials, oral histories, and pamphlets—forms that push against the boundaries of what is considered strictly literary. In these varied materials, she reveals common political and feminist alliances across geographic boundaries.

A unique comparative look at women’s literary work and its relationship to the body in third world societies, this text will be of interest to literary scholars and to those working in the fields of postcolonial studies and women’s studies.

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Postcolonial Subjects
Francophone Women Writers
Mary Green
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

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The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer
Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen
Mary Poovey
University of Chicago Press, 1984
"A brilliant, original, and powerful book. . . . This is the most skillful integration of feminism and Marxist literary criticism that I know of." So writes critic Stephen Greenblatt about The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Mary Poovey's study of the struggle of three prominent writers to accommodate the artist's genius to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideal of the modest, self-effacing "proper lady." Interpreting novels, letters, journals, and political tracts in the context of cultural strictures, Poovey makes an important contribution to English social and literary history and to feminist theory.

"The proper lady was a handy concept for a developing bourgeois patriarchy, since it deprived women of worldly power, relegating them to a sanctified domestic sphere that, in complex ways, nourished and sustained the harsh 'real' world of men. With care and subtle intelligence, Poovey examines this 'guardian and nemesis of the female self' through the ways it is implicated in the style and strategies of three very different writers."—Rachel M. Brownstein, The Nation

"The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer is a model of . . . creative discovery, providing a well-researched, illuminating history of women writers at the turn of the nineteenth century. [Poovey] creates sociologically and psychologically persuasive accounts of the writers: Wollstonecraft, who could never fully transcend the ideology of propriety she attacked; Shelley, who gradually assumed a mask of feminine propriety in her social and literary styles; and Austen, who was neither as critical of propriety as Wollstonecraft nor as accepting as Shelley ultimately became."—Deborah Kaplan, Novel

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Public History, Private Stories
Italian Women’s Autobiography
Graziella Parati
University of Minnesota Press, 1996

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Publishing Women
Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy
Diana Robin
University of Chicago Press, 2007

Even the most comprehensive Renaissance histories have neglected the vibrant groups of women writers that emerged in cities across Italy during the mid-1500s—and the thriving network of printers, publishers, and agents that specialized in producing and selling their books. In Publishing Women, Diana Robin finally brings to life this story of women’s cultural and intellectual leadership in early modern Italy, illuminating the factors behind—and the significance of—their sudden dominance.

Focusing on the collective publication process, Robin portrays communities in Naples, Venice, Rome, Siena, and Florence, where women engaged in activities that ranged from establishing literary salons to promoting religious reform. Her innovative cultural history considers the significant roles these women played in tandem with men, rather than separated from them. In doing so, it collapses the borders between women’s history, Renaissance and Reformation studies, and book history to evoke a historical moment that catapulted women’s writings and women-sponsored books into the public sphere for the first time anywhere in Europe.

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