Mullins, Rebecca ENG234 Introduction to Women's Literature: Books

This book pays tribute to the diversity and vitality of American women writers through more than a century, and to the courage and resilience of young women through a compelling range of life experiences. Selected from the work of two dozen distinguished writers published by The Feminist Press, these stories explore the resonant theme of coming of age as a woman. How do girls and young women discover -- or create -- a sense of who they are and who they may become?

Although the "bitch" has always commanded a prominent spot in popular culture--television, movies, art--she virtually disappeared from the work of the second wave of feminist writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Now, announces Sarah Appleton Aguiar, the bitch is back, returned once more to cultural center stage in the world of serious literature. The village gossips, calculating gold-diggers, merciless backstabbers, sinful sirens, evil stepmothers, deadly daughters, twisted sisters, hags, bags, and crones--all have returned. Focusing on the traits and the types of guises usually associated with this vital character, Aguiar discusses such characters as Zenia in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride, Ruth Patchett in Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Sula in Toni Morrison's Sula, and Ginny in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres.

The life narratives in this collection are by ethnically diverse women of energy and ambition--some well known, some forgotten over generations--who confronted barriers of gender, class, race, and sexual difference as they pursued or adapted to adventurous new lives in a rapidly changing America. The engaging selections--from captivity narratives to letters, manifestos, criminal confessions, and childhood sketches--span a hundred years in which women increasingly asserted themselves publicly.

The Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin--to name only a few--provide a vivid portrait of a tumultuous century. Most literary histories of the period have highlighted men's interpretations of the events and issues of the time, and have focused primarily on the public (and therefore predominantly male) social sphere. The facts of women's experience in this century, and of their increasingly public struggle to define themselves as whole and independent beings, has not been thoroughly examined in relation to their literary creation.

Responding to the increasingly powerful presence of dystopian literature for young adults, this volume focuses on novels featuring a female protagonist who contends with societal and governmental threats at the same time that she is navigating the treacherous waters of young adulthood. The contributors relate the liminal nature of the female protagonist to liminality as a unifying feature of dystopian literature, literature for and about young women, and cultural expectations of adolescent womanhood.

While Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston are often linked together, few scholars have looked critically and systematically at what the two actually have in common. This study documents the many ways that Hurston has influenced Walker and demonstrates how Walker, by taking the best of Hurston and making it live in striking new ways, has accorded Hurston a literary immortality apart from that which Hurston earned in her own right.

An original critical introduction to women characters in the novels of Jane Austen.

In the much anticipated follow-up to the landmark biography The Brontes, Juliet Barker uses her unrivaled knowledge of the Bronte family, including newly discovered letters and manuscripts, to create an absorbing and entertaining book that is as original, compelling, and bold as the Bronte family.

Throughout human history, motherhood and maternal experience have been largely defined and written by patriarchal culture. In recent literary texts, however, more substantial attention has been given to motherhood and to the physical, psychological, social, and cultural dynamics affecting maternal experience. In Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith, Paula Gallant Eckard examines how maternal experience is depicted in selected novels by three American writers, emphasizing how they focus on the body and the voice of the mother

Some contemporary crime writers are a bit sniffy about Agatha Christie. Agatha Christie aimed to write literate, entertaining crime novels that would puzzle and confuse – but never cheat – her readers. And that’s what she achieved – magnificently. She also helped to define the crime novel. Though nobody now writes the same sort of books except as pastiche, Agatha Christie still casts a long shadow over the genre.

Most of the women here (all were born in the 20th century) have toiled long and hard, often in obscurity, their love of words keeping the storytelling art alive and high art it is. Each writer was asked to address how the Appalachian culture had affected them. Whites, African-Americans, and Native Americans are represented.

This anthology brings together the work of 105 Appalachian women writers, including Dorothy Allison; Barbara Kingsolver; Harriette Simpson Arnow; Annie Dillard; Nikki Giovani; Denise Giardina; Jayne Anne Philips; Janice Holt Giles; George Ella Lyon; Sharyn McCrumb; and Lee Smith.

The voices in "Writing Who We Are" come from the depths of Kentucky women's souls in the form of flaming poetry. Notorious for their gracious silence, the Kentucky women in this collection used megaphones. Some of the poetry dealt with hardships faced; others spoke of the love of mothers and other powerful, influential women in their lives. Many honed in on the rich landscape of Kentucky, using flowers, earth, and homesteads to weave their "stories" into poems.