Great Women Writers, 1900-1950


Book Description

Offers biographies of eight prominent American women authors of the twentieth century: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Anne Porter, Zora Neale Hurston, Pearl Buck, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor




The Vintage Book of American Women Writers


Book Description

For centuries women have been marginalized and overlooked in American literary history. That injustice is corrected in this entertaining and provocative collection of 350 years of poetry and fiction by American women. From Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet to Margaret Fuller to Harriet Beecher Stowe, readers will encounter scores of lesser-known and forgotten writers who fully deserve to be rediscovered and enjoyed by new generations. Our famous women writers, including contemporary stars like Annie Proux and Jhumpa Lahiri, are showcased in their full literary context, offering an epic overview of the canon in one monumental, dazzling volume. This landmark anthology features the best work of our best American women, and was inspired and informed by the author's groundbreaking history celebrating women writers, A Jury of Her Peers.




Literary Witches


Book Description

An NPR Best Book of 2017 Celebrate the witchiest women writers with an inventive guidebook that pairs imaginative vignettes with whimsical, folkloric illustrations. Literary Witches reimagines visionary writers as witches: both are figures of formidable creativity, empowerment, and general badassery. Through a series of thirty lyrical portraits, Taisia Kitaiskaia and Katy Horan honor the witchy qualities of well-known and obscure authors alike, including Virginia Woolf, Mira Bai, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Octavia E. Butler, Sandra Cisneros, and many more. Perfect for both book lovers and coven members, Literary Witches is a treasure trove of creative and courageous women who aren’t afraid to be alone in the woods of their imagination. Kitaiskaia and Horan conjure evocative, highly stylized depictions of history’s most beloved female authors, introduce enchanting new writers, and invite you to rediscover the magic of literature.




How to Suppress Women's Writing


Book Description

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




The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States


Book Description

"A sumptuous selection of short fiction and poetry. . . . Its invitation to share the passion of women's voices characterizes the entire volume."--"USA Today."




Japanese Women Writers


Book Description

Women have made many important contributions to Japanese literature since the Heian period (794-1192), when Murasaki Shikibu wrote her prose masterpiece, The Tale of Genji. Even earlier, though documentation is scant, women actively participated in Japanese letters as poets. This reference is a guide to the work of Japanese women writers from centuries ago to the present day. The volume includes 58 alphabetically arranged biographical and critical profiles of these women. The book profiles women writers who are considered mainstream writers in Japan and who have attracted attention in the West, chiefly through translations of their works and critical scholarship on their writings. Each entry discusses the subject's life, career, major works, and works in English translation. A bibliography concludes each article. While most of the women are poets, novelists, or authors of classical narrative fiction, the book also includes entries for premodern diarists, modern dramatists, television script writers, and movie scenario writers. An extensive bibliography and chronology conclude the volume.




Women who Write


Book Description

Looks at the literary contribution of various of women authors throughout the ages.




The Quick and the Dead


Book Description

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • From one of our most heralded writers comes the “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny” (The Washington Post Book World) life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert. Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents—from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum—accompanied by restless, confounded adults. A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old—the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless. With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent. Gloriously funny and wonderfully serious, The Quick and the Dead limns the vagaries of love, the thirst for meaning, and the peculiar paths by which all creatures are led to their destiny. A panorama of contemporary life and an endlessly surprising tour de force: penetrating and magical, ominous and comic, this is the most astonishing book yet in Joy Williams's illustrious career. Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, "in the company of Céline, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood."




The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers


Book Description

The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers considers the important literary, historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts of American women authors from the seventeenth century to the present and provides readers with an analysis of current literary trends and debates in women’s literature. This accessible and engaging guide covers a variety of essential topics, such as: the transatlantic and transnational origins of American women's literary traditions the colonial period and the Puritans the early national period and the rhetoric of independence the nineteenth century and the Civil War the twentieth century, including modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights era trends in twenty-first century American women's writing feminism, gender and sexuality, regionalism, domesticity, ethnicity, and multiculturalism. The volume examines the ways in which women writers from diverse racial, social, and cultural backgrounds have shaped American literary traditions, giving particular attention to the ways writers worked inside, outside, and around the strictures of their cultural and historical moments to create space for women’s voices and experiences as a vital part of American life. Addressing key contemporary and theoretical debates, this comprehensive overview presents a highly readable narrative of the development of literature by American women and offers a crucial range of perspectives on American literary history.




Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century


Book Description

In 1788, the Catalogue of Five Hundred Celebrated Authors of Great Britain, Now Living forecast a form of authorship that rested on biographical revelation and media saturation as well as literary achievement. This collection traces the unique experiences of women writers within a celebrity culture that was intimately connected to the expansion of print technology and of visual and material culture in the nineteenth century. The contributors examine a wide range of artifacts, including prefaces, portraits, frontispieces, birthday books, calendars and gossip columns, to consider the nature of women's celebrity and the forces that created it. How did authors like Jane Austen, the Countess of Blessington, Louisa May Alcott, Alice Meynell, and Marie Corelli negotiate the increasing demands for public revelation of the private self? How did gender shape the posthumous participation of women writers such as Jane Austen, Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Christina Rossetti in celebrity culture? These and other important questions related to the treatment of women in celebrity genres and media, and the strategies women writers used to control their public images, are taken up in this suggestive exploration of how nineteenth and early twentieth century women writers achieved popular, critical, and commercial success.