A collection of short stories by a writer better known for her verse, stories that explore the cruel xuperficialities of social behavior and the heartbreak of failed love.

Preface and Acknowledgments. SECTION I: ENGENDERING LANGUAGE, SILENCE, AND VOICE. Introduction. Annotated Bibliography. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). A Room of One's Own. bell hooks (1955-). Talking Back. Leoba of England and Germany (700?-780). Letter to Lord Boniface. Matilda, Queen of England (1080-1118). Letter to Archbishop Anselm. Letter to Pope Pascal. Anne Lock (fl.1556-1590). from A Meditation of a penitent sinner, upon the 51 psalm. Isabella Whitney (fl. 1567-1573?). The Author. . .Maketh Her Will and Testament. from The Manner of Her Will. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673). The Poetess's Hasty Resolution. The Poetess's Petition. An Excuse for So Much Writ upon My Verses. Nature's Cook. from To All Writing Ladies. Anne Killigrew (1660-1685). Upon the Saying that My Verses Were Made by Another. On a Picture Painted by Herself. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720). The Introduction. A Nocturnal Reverie. Ardelia to Melancholy. Friendship between Ephelia and Ardelia. The Answer. Frances Burney (1752-1840). from The Diary of Frances Burney. Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849). from Letters for Literary Ladies. Jane Austen (1775-1817). Northanger Abbey. Mary Shelley (1797-1851). Introduction to Frankenstein. Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855). Letter from Robert Southey. Letter to Robert Southey . Letter to George Henry Lewes. Emily Brontë (1818-1848). [Alone I sat; the summer day]. To Imagination. The Night Wind. R. Alcona to J. Brenzaida. [No coward soul is mine]. Stanzas. George Eliot (1819-1880). Silly Novels by Lady Novelists. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). The Yellow Wallpaper. Edith Wharton (1862-1937). A Journey. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). from Patriarchal Poetry. Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). from Dust Tracks on a Road. Stevie Smith (1902-1971). My Muse Sits Forlorn. A Dream of Comparison. Thoughts about the Person from Porlock. May Sarton (1912-95). Journey Toward Poetry. The Muse as Medusa. Of the Muse. Hisaye Yamamoto (1921-). Seventeen Syllables. Maxine Hong Kingston (1940-). No Name Woman. Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-). Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers. Alice Walker (1944-). In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Medbh McGuckian (1950-). To My Grandmother. From the Dressing Room. Turning the Moon into a Verb. Carol Ann Duffy (1955-). Standing Female Nude. Litany. Mrs. Aesop. Gcina Mhlophe (1959-). The Toilet. Sometimes When It Rains. The Dancer. Say No. Intertextualities. Topics for Discussion, Journals, and Essays. Group Writing and Performance Exercise. Barbara Christian (1943-). The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism. Elaine Showalter (1941-). Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness. SECTION II: WRITING BODIES/BODIES WRITING. Introduction. Annotated Bibliography. Hélène Cixous (1937-). The Laugh of the Medusa. Nancy Mairs (1943-). Reading Houses, Writing Lives: The French Connection. Anonymous. The Wife's Lament (8th century?). Anonymous. Wulf and Eadwacer (8th century?). Margery Kempe (1373?-1438). from The Book of Margery Kempe. Margery Brews Paston (1457?-1495). Letters to her Valentine/fiance. Letter to her husband, John Paston. Elizabeth I (1533-1603). On Monsieur's Departure. When I Was Fair and Young. Mary Wroth (1587?-1653?). from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Aphra Behn (1640-1689). The Lucky Chance. Jane Barker (1652-1727). A Virgin Life. Delarivier Manley (1663-1724). from The New Atalantis. Eliza Haywood (1693?-1756). from The Female Spectator. Harriet Jacobs (1813?-1897). from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). Monna Innominata. Djuna Barnes (1892-1982). from Ladies Almanack. To the Dogs. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950),. from Fatal Interview. Anne Sexton (1928-1974). The Abortion. In Celebration of My Uterus. For My Lover, Returning to His Wife. Audre Lorde (1934-1992). Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Love Poem. Chain. Restoration-A Memorial. Bharati Mukherjee (1938-). A Wife's Story. Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1996). My Man Bovanne. Sharon Olds (1942-). That Year. The Language of the Brag. The Girl. Sex Without Love. Slavenka Drakulic (1949-). Makeup and Other Crucial Questions. Joy Harjo (1951-). Fire. Deer Ghost. City of Fire. Heartshed. Dionne Brand (1953-). Madame Alaird's Breasts. Sandra Cisneros (1955-). I the Woman. Love Poem #1. Jackie Kay (1961-). Close Shave. Other Lovers. Intertextualities. Topics for Discussion, Journals, and Essays. Group Writing and Performance Exercise. Catherine Gallagher (1945-). Who Was That Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra Behn. Shari Benstock (1944-). The Lesbian Other.

Discusses the obstacles women have had to overcome in order to become writers, and identifies the sexist rationalizations used to trivialize their contributions

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.

This book highlights the multiplicity of American women’s writing related to liminality and hybridity from its beginnings to the contemporary moment. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these concepts as they appear in American women’s writing contest as well as perpetuate exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The collection’s introduction, three unit introductions, fourteen individual essays, and afterward facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women writers. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on canonical writers as well as introduce readers to new authors. As a whole, the collection demonstrates American women’s writing is “threshold writing,” or writing that occupies a liminal, hybrid space that both delimits borders and offers enticing openings.

Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance. These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.

Often poorly represented in buyers' guides, women's books are now covered in this articulate and intentionally eclectic reader's guide. Covering a wealth of remarkable novels, narratives, biographies, and more, this resource for general readers offers more than 500 entries--capturing the flavor of each book. Includes seven cross-referenced indexes.

Encompassing Pulitzer Prize winners Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Rita Dove, national icons Maya Angelou and Nikki African Giovanni, and prominent cult figures Zora Neale Hurston and Octavia Butler, African American women's literature is the one of the fastest growing areas of American literature today. This is the first comprehensive anthology of African American women's literature. This is the only book that covers all historical periods, from the 18th century up through the early years of the 21st century; and all genres: from poems, essays, journal entries, and short stories to novels and black feminist criticism. An exciting and interested reader for anyone who wants a comprehensive package of African-American women's writings.

With the literary canon consisting mostly of works created by and about men, the central perspective is decidedly male. This unique reference offers alternate approaches to reading traditional literature, as well as suggestions for expanding the canon to include more gender sensitive works. Covering 96 of the most frequently taught works of fiction, essays offer teachers, librarians, and students fresh insights into the female perspective in literature. The list of titles, created in consultation with educators, includes classic works by male authors like Dickens, Faulkner, and Twain, balanced with works by female authors such as Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Also included are contemporary works by writers such as Alice Walker and Margaret Atwood that are being incorporated into the curriculum, as well as those advancing a more global view, such as Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The essays are expertly written in an accessible language that will help students gain greater awareness of gender-related themes. Suggestions for classroom discussions—with selected works for further study—are incorporated into the entries. The volume is organized alphabetically by title and includes both author and subject indexes. An appendix of gender-related themes further enhances this volume's usefulness for curriculum applications and student research projects.

The field of American women's writing is one characterized by innovation: scholars are discovering new authors and works, as well as new ways of historicizing this literature, rethinking contexts, categories and juxtapositions. Now, after three decades of scholarly investigation and innovation, the rich complexity and diversity of American literature written by women can be seen with a new coherence and subtlety. Dedicated to this expanding heterogeneity, The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature develops and challenges historical, cultural, theoretical, even polemical methods, all of which will advance the future study of American women writers - from Native Americans to postmodern communities, from individual careers to communities of writers and readers. This volume immerses readers in a new dialogue about the range and depth of women's literature in the United States and allows them to trace the ever-evolving shape of the field.