Ezell critically examines these successful women's literary histories and applies to them the same self-conscious feminism that critics have applied to more traditional methods. Drawing both on French feminisms and on recent historicist scholarship, Ezell points us to new possibilities for the recovery of early modern women's literary history. By championing the recovery of "lost" women writers and insisting on reevaluating the past, women's studies and feminist theory have effected dramatic changes in the ways English literary history is written and taught. In Writing Women's Literary History, Margaret Ezell critically examines these successful women's literary histories and applies to them the same self-conscious feminism that critics have applied to more traditional methods. According to Ezell, by relying not only on past male scholarship but also on inherited notions of "tradition," some feminist historicists replicate the evolutionary, narrative model of history that originally marginalized women who wrote before 1700. Drawing both on French feminisms and on recent historicist scholarship, Ezell points us to new possibilities for the recovery of early modern women's literary history.

Drawing on three decades of feminist scholarship bent on rediscovering lost and abandoned women writers, Susan Staves provides a comprehensive history of women's writing in Britain from the Restoration to the French Revolution. This major work of criticism also offers fresh insights about women's writing in all literary forms, not only fiction, but also poetry, drama, memoir, autobiography, biography, history, essay, translation and the familiar letter. Authors celebrated in their own time and who have been neglected, and those who have been revalued and studied, are given equal attention. The book's organisation by chronology and its attention to history challenge the way we periodise literary history. Each chapter includes a list of key works written in the period covered, as well as a narrative and critical assessment of the works. This magisterial work includes a comprehensive bibliography and list of prevalent editions of the authors discussed.

"The essays provide new research into women's literary history from the late seventeenth century to the Modernist period covering topics such as women's science and anti-slavery writing, midwifery, women and the novel, and lesbian literary history. Essays discuss the writing of Jane Sharp, Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Jacob, Phebe Lankester, Pauline Johnson, May Sinclair, Amy Levy, Edith Ellis, and Amy Wilson Carmichael."--BOOK JACKET.

" For many years young writers experimenting with forms and aesthetics in the early decades of this century, small journals known collectively as "little" magazines were the key to recognition. Joyce, Stein, Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, and scores of other iconoclastic writers now considered central to modernism received little encouragement from the established publishers. It was the avant-garde magazines, many of them headed by women, that fostered new talent and found a readership for it. Jayne Marek examines the work of seven women editors -- Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, H.D., Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), and Marianne Moore -- whose varied activities, often behind the scenes and in collaboration with other women, contributed substantially to the development of modernist literature. Through such publications as Poetry, The Little Review, The Dial, and Close Up, these women had a profound influence that has been largely overlooked by literary historians. Marek devotes a chapter as well to the interactions of these editors with Ezra Pound, who depended upon but also derided their literary tastes and accomplishments. Pound's opinions have had lasting influence in shaping critical responses to women editors of the early twentieth century. In the current reevaluation of modernism, this important book, long overdue, offers an indispensable introduction to the formative influence of women editors, both individually and in their collaborative efforts. Jayne Marek is associate professor of English at Franklin College.

Women Writers in the United States is a celebration of the many forms of work - written and social, tangible and intangible - produced by American women. Furthering their work in The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States, Davis and West document the variety and volume of women's work in the United States in a clear and accessible timeline format. They present information on the full spectrum of women's writing - including fiction, poetry, biography, political manifestos, essays, advice columns, and cookbooks - alongside a chronology of developments in social and cultural history that are especially pertinent to women's lives. This extensive chronology illustrates the diversity of women who have lived and written in the United States and creates a sense of the full trajectory of individual careers. A valuable and rich source of information on women's studies, literature, and history, Women Writers in the United States will enable readers to locate familiar and unfamiliar women's texts and to place them in the context out of which they emerged.

In the aftermath of the May Fourth movement, a growing expectation of revolution raised important intellectual issues about the position of the individual within a society in turmoil and the shifting boundaries of political and sexual identities. The theme of "revolution plus love," a literary response to the widespread insurrections and upheaval, was first popularized in the late 1920s. In her examination of this popular but understudied literary formula, Liu Jianmei argues that revolution and love are culturally variable entities, their interplay a complex and constantly changing literary practice that is socially and historically determined. Liu looks at the formulary writing of "revolution plus love" from the 1930s to the 1970s as a case study of literary politics. Favored by leftist writers during the early period of revolutionary literature, it continued to influence mainstream Chinese literature up to the 1970s. By drawing a historical picture of the articulation and rearticulation of this theme, Liu shows how changes in revolutionary discourse force unpredictable representations of gender rules and power relations, and how women's bodies reveal the complex interactions between political representation and gender roles. Revolution Plus Love is a nuanced and carefully considered work on gender and modernity in China, unmatched in its broad use of literary resources. It will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of modern Chinese literature, women’s studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature.

Many of America’s foremost, and most beloved, authors are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a writer as “southern” if her work reflects the region’s grip on her life, Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks have produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and enduring tradition of southern women’s literature. Their comprehensive history—the first of its kind in a relatively young field—extends from the pioneer woman to the career woman, embracing black and white, poor and privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and experiences. The History of Southern Women’s Literature allows readers both to explore individual authors and to follow the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters; the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel; autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and newspaper writing—these and more receive close attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here, and their essays discuss a wealth of women’s issues from four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned social roles—from the belle to the mammy—and real life behind the facade of meeting others’ expectations; poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the influence of Gone with the Wind. The history of southern women’s literature tells, ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an “insidious tradition,” to quote Ellen Glasgow. This teeming volume validates the deep contributions and pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a major achievement in women’s and literary studies.

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. From colonial times, women have been at the forefront of significant developments in the literary community and the book world. Despite this important history, no single publication has provided an overview of women's roles in writing, publishing, bookselling, and librarianship. With WOMEN IN THE LITERARY LANDSCAPE, in honor of its Centennial, the WNBA breaks new ground with a narrative connecting women's contributions in these fields with the relevant social history.

The English literary canon is haunted by the figure of the lost woman writer. In our own age, she has been a powerful stimulus for the rediscovery of works written by women. But as Jennifer Summit argues, "the lost woman writer" also served as an evocative symbol during the very formation of an English literary tradition from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Lost Property traces the representation of women writers from Margery Kempe and Christine de Pizan to Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, exploring how the woman writer became a focal point for emerging theories of literature and authorship in English precisely because of her perceived alienation from tradition. Through original archival research and readings of key literary texts, Summit writes a new history of the woman writer that reflects the impact of such developments as the introduction of printing, the Reformation, and the rise of the English court as a literary center. A major rethinking of the place of women writers in the histories of books, authorship, and canon-formation, Lost Property demonstrates that, rather than being an unimaginable anomaly, the idea of the woman writer played a key role in the invention of English literature.

Women's literary histories usually start in the later Middle Ages, but recent scholarship has shown that actually women were at the heart of the emergence of the English literary tradition. Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 focuses on the period before the so-called 'Barking Renaissance' of women's writing in the 12th century. By examining the surviving evidence of women's authorship, as well as the evidence of women's engagement with literary culture more widely, Diane Watt argues that early women's writing was often lost, suppressed, or deliberately destroyed. In particular she considers the different forms of male 'overwriting', to which she ascribes the multiple connotations of 'destruction', 'preservation', 'control' and 'suppression'. She uses the term to describe the complex relationship between male authors and their female subjects to capture the ways in which texts can attempt to control and circumscribe female autonomy. Written by one of the leading experts in medieval women's writing, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100 examines women's literary engagement in monasteries such as Ely, Whitby, Barking and Wilton Abbey, as well as letters and hagiographies from the 8th and 9th centuries. Diane Watt provides a much-needed look at women's writing in the early medieval period that is crucial to understanding women's literary history more broadly.