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Women's playwriting burgeoned in the United States and the United Kingdom as part of the feminist movement of the 1970s. Ever since, playwriting women have been embracing new subjects, experimenting with form, and devising new ways of looking at the world. To honor their achievements and inspire future endeavors, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize was established in memory of an American actor, journalist, and feminist who died of breast cancer. In the nearly three decades of the award's existence, more than three hundred English-speaking women playwrights have been finalists for the Blackburn Prize in recognition of their work, including such prominent writers as Marsha Norman, Cheryl L. West, Wendy Wasserstein, Caryl Churchill, Paula Vogel, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

This volume offers a comprehensive overview of women's playwriting, as well as a celebration of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. It combines critical essays, playwrights' memoirs, and conversations and interviews with playwrights to explore how women's playwriting evolved in relation to the women's movement and how it continues to map new territory and find fresh modes of expression. The majority of contributors to this volume—playwrights, arts journalists, and theater critics—have had some connection to the Blackburn Prize, either as award recipients, play readers, or judges. The memoirs, conversations, and interviews come from some of the finest women playwrights of the last three decades. These dramatists offer fascinating insight into the playwriting art, theatrical careers, and women's goals in writing for the theater.

Women and Communal Worship advances our understanding of early modern women by uncovering and analyzing Christian women’s engagement with liturgical and communal worship between 1500 and 1750. The Protestant attack on the medieval liturgy was at the heart of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but women’s contributions to those momentous changes have been largely overlooked as scholars have focused on women’s private devotional practices and texts. This collection of essays demonstrates that communal worship was vital to women of all confessional stripes. Although they could not generally lead the liturgy, women shaped public devotion in important ways, whether at the level of the local congregation, the household chapel, the convent, the court, or the national church. Communal worship is thus a key site for examining women’s textual, literary, social, and political agency.

One of the most famous living French writers, Marguerite Duras is renowned for her provocative and hauntingly beautiful works of fiction, drama, and cinema. This book offers the first comprehensive study of the narrative and stylistic characteristics of Duras's fiction. Susan D. Cohen examines the entire range of Duras's works, combining close textual analyses with a more general discussion of narrativity and its connections with gender, class, and race. The focus throughout is on language, representation, and difference, which Duras explores on every structural level.

Cohen shows how Duras's writings, even the controversial “erotic” works, expose and subvert the repression of women in traditional, dominant discourse and at the same time present an alternative, nonrepressive discursive model. She formulates a concept of creative “ignorance,” which she identifies as the generative principle of Duras's textual production and the approach to language it proposes. Cohen also explores the distinctive features of Duras's prose, describing how the writer achieves the ritual, legendary aura that characterizes her work.

The astonishing talent of Argentine women writers belies the struggles they have faced—not merely as overlooked authors, but as women of conviction facing oppression. The patriarchal pressures of the Perón years, the terror of the Dirty War, and, more recently, the economic collapse that gripped the nation in 2001 created such repressive conditions that some writers, such as Luisa Valenzuela, left the country for long periods. Not surprisingly, power has become an inescapable theme in Argentine women's fiction, and this collection shows how the dynamics of power capture not only the political world but also the personal one. Whether their characters are politicians and peasants, torturers and victims, parents and children, or lovers male and female, each writer explores the effects of power as it is exercised by or against women.

The fifteen writers chosen for Women and Power in Argentine Literature include famous names such as Valenzuela, as well as authors anthologized for the first time, most notably María Kodama, widow of Jorge Luis Borges. Each chapter begins with a "verbal portrait," editor Gwendolyn Díaz's personal impression of the author at ease, formed through hours of conversation and interviews. A biographical essay and critical commentary follow, with emphasis on the work included in this anthology. Díaz's interviews, translated from Spanish, and finally the stories themselves—only three of which have been previously published in English—complete the chapters. The extraordinary depth of these chapters reflects the nuanced, often controversial portrayals of power observed by Argentine women writers. Inspiring as well as insightful, Women and Power in Argentine Literature is ultimately about women who, in Díaz's words, "choose to speak their truth regardless of the consequences."

Whitt explores the lives of women reporters who achieved significant historical recognition, such as Ida Tarbell and Ida Wells-Barnett. Investigating the often blurry boundary between journalism and literature, she explains how this fluid distinction has actually limited how many scholars perceive the contributions of authors such as Joan Didion and Susan Orlean. Whitt also highlights the work of important novelists, including Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty, to shed light on how their work as journalists informed their highly successful fiction.

This study also offers a survey of contributions women have made to the alternative presses, including the environmental press and civil rights activism. Whitt examines important figures in the early feminist press such as Caroline Churchill, editor and reporter for Denver’s Queen Bee, and Betty Wilkins of Kansas City’s Call. Finally, through newsletters, newspapers, magazines, and journals, she traces the history of the lesbian press and points out the ways in which it indicates that the alternative press is thriving.

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.

Interest in the mother-daughter relationship has never been greater, yet there are few books specifically devoted to the relationships between daughters and mothers of color. To fill that gap, this collection of original essays explores the mother-daughter relationship as it appears in the works of African, African American, Asian American, Mexican American, Native American, Indian, and Australian Aboriginal women writers.

Prominent among the writers considered here are Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cherrie Moraga, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Amy Tan. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory and the other essayists examine the myths and reality surrounding the mother-daughter relationship in these writers' works. They show how women writers of color often portray the mother-daughter dyad as a love/hate relationship, in which the mother painstakingly tries to convey knowledge of how to survive in a racist, sexist, and classist world while the daughter rejects her mother's experiences as invalid in changing social times.

This book represents a further opening of the literary canon to twentieth-century women of color. Like the writings it surveys, it celebrates the joys of breaking silence and moving toward reconciliation and growth.

Now available in a durable paperback edition, Shari Benstock's critically acclaimed, best-selling Women of the Left Bank is a fascinating exploration of the lives and works of some two dozen American, English, and French women whose talent shaped the Paris expatriate experience in the century's early years.

This ambitious historical, biographical, and critical study has taken its place among the foremost works of literary criticism. Maurice Beebe calls it "a distinguished contribution to modern literary history." Jane Marcus hails it as "the first serious literary history of the period and its women writers, making along the way no small contribution to our understanding of the relationships between women artists and their male counterparts, from Henry James to Hemingway, Joyce, Picasso, and Pound."

This pathbreaking collection features original essays by leading scholars working at the intersections of women’s literary history, book history, and media cultures. Drawing on underexplored archives and innovative methodologies—from feminist bibliography to digital humanities—the contributors generate new narratives about the long eighteenth century and the centrality of gender to its literary production. Moving beyond a narrow focus on authorship, the chapters recover women as writers and readers, editors and curators, printers and book owners, scholars, preachers, and political actors. Across print, manuscript, and oral cultures, they illuminate the collaborative networks and material conditions shaping cultural production and circulation. Organized into sections on print histories, manuscript cultures, and new methodological approaches, this collection reshapes eighteenth-century studies while modeling ethically engaged archival research. Accessible and wide-ranging, it will appeal to scholars and students in literary studies, women’s and gender studies, and book history alike.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

    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.

The first in-depth examination of the texts produced in English Benedictine convents between 1600 and 1800.

After Catholicism became illegal in England during the sixteenth century, Englishwomen established more than twenty convents on the Continent that attracted thousands of nuns and served as vital centers of Catholic piety until the French Revolution. Today more than 1,000 manuscripts and books produced by, and for, the Benedictine convents are extant in European archives. Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1800 provides the first substantive analysis of these works in order to examine how members of one religious order used textual production to address a major dilemma experienced by every English convent on the Continent: How could English nuns cultivate a cloistered identity when the Protestant Reformation had swept away nearly all vestiges of English monasticism?

Drawing on an innovative blend of methodologies, Jaime Goodrich contends that the Benedictines instilled a collective sense of spirituality through writings that created multiple overlapping communities, ranging from the earthly society of the convent to the transhistorical network of the Catholic Church. Because God resides at the heart of these communities, Goodrich draws on the works of Martin Buber, a twentieth-century Jewish philosopher who theorized that human community forms a circle, with each member acting as a radius leading toward the common center of God. Buber’s thought, especially his conception of the I-You framework for personal and spiritual relationships, illuminates a fourfold set of affiliations central to Benedictine textual production: between the nuns themselves, between the individual nun and God, between the convent and God, and between the convent and the Catholic public sphere. By evoking these relationships, the major genres of convent writing—administrative texts, spiritual works, history and life writing, and controversial tracts—functioned as tools for creating community and approaching God.

Through this Buberian reading of the cloister, Writing Habits recovers the works of Benedictine nuns and establishes their broader relevance to literary history and critical theory.