Sonia Sanchez is a prolific, award-winning poet and one of the most prominent writers in the Black Arts movement. This collection brings her plays together in one volume for the first time. Like her poetry, Sanchez’s plays voice her critique of the racism and sexism that she encountered as a young female writer in the black militant community in the late 1960s and early 1970s, her ongoing concern with the well-being of the black community, and her commitment to social justice. In addition to The Bronx Is Next (1968), Sister Son/ji (1969), Dirty Hearts (1971), Malcolm/Man Don’t Live Here No Mo (1972), and Uh, Uh; But How Do It Free Us? (1974), this collection includes the never-before-published dramas I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t (1982) and 2 X 2 (2009), as well as three essays in which Sanchez reflects on her art and activism. Jacqueline Wood’s introduction illuminates Sanchez’s stagecraft in relation to her poetry and advocacy for social change, and the feminist dramatic voice in black revolutionary art.

Imagining Rhetoric examines how women’s writing developed in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, and how women imagined using their education to further the civic aims of an idealistic new nation.

In the late eighteenth century, proponents of female education in the United States appropriated the language of the Revolution to advance the cause of women’s literacy. Schooling for women—along with abolition, suffrage, and temperance—became one of the four primary arenas of nineteenth-century women’s activism. Following the Revolution, textbooks and fictions about schooling materialized that revealed ideal curricula for women covering subjects from botany and chemistry to rhetoric and composition. A few short decades later, such curricula and hopes for female civic rhetoric changed under the pressure of threatened disunion.

Using a variety of texts, including novels, textbooks, letters, diaries, and memoirs, Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen chart the shifting ideas about how women should learn and use writing, from the early days of the republic through the antebellum years. They also reveal how these models shaped women’s awareness of female civic rhetoric—both its possibilities and limitations.

Of the many literary phenomena that sprang up in eighteenth-century England and later became a staple of Victorian culture, one that has received little attention until now is the “Family Bible with Notes.” Published in serial parts to make it affordable, the Family Bible was designed to enhance the family’s status and sense of national and imperial identity.

Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies reveals in its study of the production and consumption of British commercial Family Bibles startling changes in “family values.” Advertised in the eighteenth century as providing the family with access to “universal knowledge,” these Bibles suddenly shifted in the early nineteenth century to Bibles with bracketed sections marked “to be omitted from family reading” and reserved for reading “in the closet” by the “Master of the family.” These disciplinary Bibles were paralleled by Family Bibles designed to appeal to the newly important female consumer. Illustrations featured saintly women and charming children, and “family registers” with vignettes of family life emphasized the prominent role of the “angel in the house.”

As Mary Wilson Carpenter documents in Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies, the elaborate notes and “elegant engravings” in these Bibles bring to light a wealth of detail about the English commonsense view of such taboo subjects as same-sex relations, masturbation, menstruation, and circumcision. Her reading of literary texts by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the context of these commercial representations of the “Authorized Version” or King James translation of the Bible indicates that when the Victorians spoke about religion, they were also frequently speaking about sex.

A personal journey through the ever-changing natural and cultural history of Lake Superior’s South Shore

Lake Superior’s South Shore is as malleable as it is enduring, its red sandstone cliffs, clay bluffs, and golden sand beaches reshaped by winds and water from season to season—and sometimes from one hour to the next. Generations of people have inhabited the South Shore, harvesting the forests and fish, mining copper, altering the land for pleasure and profit, for better or worse. In Impermanence, author Sue Leaf explores the natural and human histories that make the South Shore what it is, from the gritty port city of Superior, Wisconsin, to the shipping locks at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. 

 

For Leaf, what began as a bicycling adventure on the coast of Lake Superior in 1977 turned into a lifelong connection with the area, and her experience, not least as owner of a rustic cabin on a rapidly eroding lakeside cliff, imbues these essays with a passionate sense of place and an abiding curiosity about its past and precarious future. As waves slowly consume the shoreline where her family has spent countless summers, Leaf is forced to confront the complexity of loving a place that all too quickly is being reclaimed by the great lake.

 

Impermanence is a journey through the South Shore’s story, from the early days of the Anishinaabe and fur traders through the heyday of commercial fishing, lumber camps, and copper mining on the Keweenaw Peninsula to the awakening of the Northland to the perils and consequences of plundering its natural splendor. Noting the geological, ecological, and cultural features of each stop on her tour along the South Shore, Leaf writes about the restoration of the heavily touristed Apostle Islands National Lakeshore to its pristine conditions, even as Lake Superior maintains its allure for ice fishers, kayakers, and long-distance swimmers. She describes efforts to protect the endangered piping plover and to preserve the diverse sand dunes on the Michigan coast, and she observes the slough that supports rare intact wild rice beds central to Anishinaabe culture.

 

Part memoir, part travelogue, part natural and cultural history, Leaf’s love letter to Lake Superior’s South Shore is an invitation to see this liminal world in all its seasons and guises, to appreciate its ageless, ever-changing wonders and intimate charms.

This excellent collection of essays and texts surveys the culture and intellectual context of early modern Italy in order to render more intelligible the writing of Italian women. The role of women in society and the persistent misogyny even of the most pro-woman texts are explored in the essays, and the recent critical debates are examined. The translations make available in English a selection of male-authored texts which directly or indirectly elicited the spirited responses of women, for which the volume is aptly entitled “In Dialogue.” A valuable classroom resource, the volume is an important addition to The Other Voice: Toronto series.
—Elissa Weaver
Professor of Italian, Emerita, University of Chicago

From the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, hundreds of British women wrote about and drew from nature. Some—like the beloved children's author Beatrix Potter, who produced natural history about hedgehogs as well as fiction about rabbits—are still familiar today. But others have all but disappeared from view. Barbara Gates recovers these lost works and prints them alongside little-known pieces by more famous authors, like Potter's field notes on hedgehogs, reminding us of better known stories that help set the others in context.

The works contained in this volume are as varied as the women who produced them. They include passionate essays on the protection of animals, vivid accounts of travel and adventure from the English seashore to the Indian Alps, poetry and fiction, and marvelous tales of nature for children. Special features of the book include a detailed chronology placing each selection in its historical and literary context; biographical sketches of each author's life and works; a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary literature; and over sixty illustrations.

An ideal introduction to women's powerful and diverse responses to the natural world, In Nature's Name will be treasured by anyone interested in natural history, women, or Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

For centuries, the stereotypical image of the voluptuous Italian woman has functioned as an object of desire for Western man: from sixteenth-century paintings of Venetian courtesans who modeled for the erotically charged canvases of Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, to nineteenth-century reports of the beautiful dancer Marie Taglioni, to the twentieth-century cinematic images of Sophia Loren and Dominique Sanda.

Now Italian women have turned the tables. With In the Forbidden City, translated from the Italian, acclaimed novelist Maria Rosa Cutrufelli brings together fourteen short erotic stories by contemporary Italian women writers. Well-established voices are juxtaposed with new ones; traditional forms provide a contrast with the experimental. In Sandra Petrignani's dialogue "Body" a women and a former lover engage in a heady debate about desire and indifference; Margherita Ciacobino delivers a tale of lesbian desire, a theme uncommon in Italian literature; Dacia Maraini writes on the literature of eroticism penned by women writers that ingeniously manages to be erotic in its own right; and Rossana Campo, in one of the most entertaining entries, offers a hip-rattling tri-logue on love voiced by some super-cool adolescents. In her introduction, Cutrufelli draws in even more writers such as Jean Baudrillard, Angela Carter, and Georges Bataille in her introductory essay on the theoretical issues of desire and seduction.

Now finally available to English readers, In the Forbidden City constitutes a breakthrough volume in literary erotica by Italian women that is both profound and engaging.

Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women’s Visions and Vitae explores the ways that women mystics sought to make their books into vehicles for the reader’s spiritual transformation. Jessica Barr argues that the cognitive work of reading these texts was meant to stimulate intensely personal responses, and that the very materiality of the book can produce an intimate encounter with God. She thus explores the differences between mystics’ biographies and their self-presentation, analyzing as well the complex rhetorical moves that medieval women writers employ to render their accounts more effective.
This new volume is structured around five case studies. Chapters consider the biographies of 13th-century holy women from Liège, the writings of Margery Kempe, Gertrude of Helfta, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich. At the heart of Intimate Reading is the question of how reading works—what it means to enter imaginatively and intellectually into the words of another. The volume showcases the complexity of medieval understandings of the work of reading, deepening our perception of the written word’s capacity to signify something that lies even beyond rational comprehension.