Results by title

Winner of the National Indie Excellence Award in Memoir and the National Indie Excellence Awards Juror's Choice Prize

A compelling and inventive memoir exploring how pain and pleasure are passed down through generations of women

For years, Lauren W. Westerfield looked back at her childhood as an imaginative playscape lovingly crafted by her artist mother. But in truth, theirs was always a fraught relationship, close yet turbulent. It wouldn’t be until her mid-twenties that Westerfield would learn that her mother was assaulted while living as a single woman in 1970s Los Angeles, or until her mid-thirties when caretaking for her now chronically ill mother during pandemic lockdown would reveal how that earlier incident and its ripple effects had shaped both their lives.

The essays and assemblages in this book plumb the depths of two women’s experiences, exploring the pain and pleasure they find in their bodies, in culture, and in their own art. Violence, beauty, and love reverberate and dissipate and shape the forms and psyches of these two profoundly connected family members. At once raw and refined, narrative and lyrical, nostalgic and blunt, the stories and images presented here explore Westerfield’s life—from childhood to adulthood—passing through innocence, self-discovery and familial tethers. In unpacking her mother’s history and the complexities of their relationship, Westerfield finds herself confronted with her own story: one grounded in a yearning for agency and individuation, of a body and mind groomed to be at odds with one another, of a feminist politics examining deeply rooted patriarchal understandings of beauty, control, and power.

Part memoir, part critical sense-making, part reckoning with family, identity, illness, addiction, art, and inheritance, Woman House draws on diverse inspirations in an attempt to recontextualize the female body—in danger, in pleasure, in portraiture, in proximity, in resistance—and challenge the structures that silence and restrict female expression. 

Women readers, editors, librarians, authors, journalists, booksellers, and others are the subjects in this stimulating new collection on modern print culture. The essays feature women like Marie Mason Potts, editor of Smoke Signals, a mid-twentieth century periodical of the Federated Indians of California; Lois Waisbrooker, publisher of books and journals on female sexuality and women's rights in the decades after the Civil War; and Elizabeth Jordan, author of two novels and editor of Harper's Bazaar from 1900 to 1913.  The volume presents a complex and engaging picture of print culture and of the forces that affected women's lives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Published in collaboration among the University of Wisconsin Press, the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America (a joint program of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society), and the University of Wisconsin–Madison General Library System Office of Scholarly Communication.

    Women, Autobiography, Theory is the first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of women’s autobiography, drawing into one volume the most significant theoretical discussions on women’s life writing of the last two decades. 
    The authoritative introduction by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson surveys writing about women’s lives from the women’s movement of the late 1960s to the present. It also relates theoretical positions in women’s autobiography studies to postmodern, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist analyses.
    The essays from thirty-nine prominent critics and writers include many considered classics in this field. They explore narratives across the centuries and from around the globe, including testimonios, diaries, memoirs, letters, trauma accounts, prison narratives, coming-out stories, coming-of-age stories, and spiritual autobiographies. A list of more than two hundred women’s autobiographies and a comprehensive bibliography of critical scholarship in women’s autobiography provide invaluable information for scholars, teachers, and readers.

As mass media burgeoned in the years between the first and second world wars, so did another phenomenon—celebrity. Beginning in Hollywood with the studio-orchestrated transformation of uncredited actors into brand-name stars, celebrity also spread to writers, whose personal appearances and private lives came to fascinate readers as much as their work. Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars profiles seven American, Canadian, and British women writers—Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Mae West, L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Kennedy, Stella Gibbons, and E. M. Delafield—who achieved literary celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s and whose work remains popular even today.

Faye Hammill investigates how the fame and commercial success of these writers—as well as their gender—affected the literary reception of their work. She explores how women writers sought to fashion their own celebrity images through various kinds of public performance and how the media appropriated these writers for particular cultural discourses. She also reassesses the relationship between celebrity culture and literary culture, demonstrating how the commercial success of these writers caused literary elites to denigrate their writing as "middlebrow," despite the fact that their work often challenged middle-class ideals of marriage, home, and family and complicated class categories and lines of social discrimination.

The first comparative study of North American and British literary celebrity, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars offers a nuanced appreciation of the middlebrow in relation to modernism and popular culture.