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American Blood: The Ends of the Family in American Literature, 1850-1900

Holly Jackson

American Blood foregrounds a culture-wide struggle over the definition and value of the family in the nineteenth-century United States. This study offers a new vision of the American ... More

American Blood foregrounds a culture-wide struggle over the definition and value of the family in the nineteenth-century United States. This study offers a new vision of the American novel in this tumultuous period, highlighting works that protest the overvaluation of kinship in American culture, depicting the domestic family as antagonistic to the political enterprise of the United States. Far from venerating the family as the nucleus of the nation, these novels imagine, even welcome, the decline of this institution and the social order it supports. Despite the founders’ concern that unseemly reverence for family relations might taint the new republic, the familial rhetoric of nationalism was deployed so energetically throughout the nineteenth century that reverence for the family came to seem like a core American value. Imaginative literature in this period retains an interest in the value of cutting blood ties, prizing the American dream of freedom from inherited identity. This study highlights works that criticize the expansion of the concept of family, viewing kinship as not only inadequate but dangerous in application to politics, suggesting that democratic citizenship should serve as the basis for coalitions across ascriptive differences. Six chapters chart the literary representation of the American family in relation to legal, scientific, literary, and political discourses from antebellum abolitionism through the Reconstruction suffrage debates, the burgeoning of feminism, and the “nadir” of post-Emancipation African American experience at the turn of the twentieth century.Less

Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works

Marie le Jars de Gournay

During her lifetime, the gifted writer Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645) was celebrated as one of the “seventy most famous women of all time” in Jean de la Forge's Circle of Learned Women (1663). ... More

During her lifetime, the gifted writer Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645) was celebrated as one of the “seventy most famous women of all time” in Jean de la Forge's Circle of Learned Women (1663). The adopted daughter of Michel de Montaigne, as well as his editor, she was a major literary force and a pioneering feminist voice during a tumultuous period in France. This volume presents translations of four of Gournay's works that address feminist issues. Two of these appear here in English for the first time: The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne and The Apology for the Woman Writing. One of the first modern psychological novels, the best-selling Promenade was also the first to explore female sexual feeling. With the autobiographical Apology, Gournay defended every aspect of her life, from her moral conduct to her household management. The book also includes her last revisions (1641) of her two best-known feminist treatises: The Equality of Men and Women and The Ladies' Complaint. The editors provide a general overview of Gournay's career, as well as individual introductions and extensive annotations for each work.Less

Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon

Vanessa Pérez Rosario

While it is rare for a poet to become a cultural icon, Julia de Burgos has evoked feelings of bonding and identification in Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States for over half a century. ... More

While it is rare for a poet to become a cultural icon, Julia de Burgos has evoked feelings of bonding and identification in Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States for over half a century. This book, the first book-length study written in English, examines poet and political activist Julia de Burgos's development as a writer, her experience of migration, and her legacy in New York City. The book situates de Burgos as part of a transitional generation that helps to bridge the historical divide between Puerto Rican nationalist writers of the 1930s and the Nuyorican writers of the 1970s. Focusing on the poet's contributions to New York Latino/a literary and visual culture, the book moves beyond the tragedy-centered narratives of de Burgos's life to examine her place within a nuanced historical understanding of Puerto Rico's peoples and culture. The book unravels the cultural and political dynamics at work when contemporary Latina/o writers and artists in New York revise, reinvent, and riff off of Julia de Burgos as they imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities.Less

Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women's Experiential Texts and Human Contexts

Chantal Zabus

In the past five decades and over three generations, African women writers have introduced a new autobiographical discourse around their experience of excision that brings nuance to the female ... More

In the past five decades and over three generations, African women writers have introduced a new autobiographical discourse around their experience of excision that brings nuance to the female genital mutilation debate. Spanning pharaonic times through classical antiquity to the onset of the twenty-first century, this study shows how this experiential body of literature—encompassing English, Arabic, and French—goes far beyond such traditional topics as universalism and cultural relativism, by locating the female body as a site of liminality between European and African factions, subject and agent; consent and dissent; custom and human rights. Women across Africa's “excision belt” have broken away from the male discourses of anthropology and psychoanalysis and have fled from “the cult of culture” and from religious and patriarchal surveillance. They have relocated their struggle to the West, where they seek empowerment and wrestle with the law. While showing the limits of autobiography, this book interweaves Freudian hysteria, the surgical age, the world of high fashion, male circumcision's “fearful symmetry,” and Western body modification.Less

Between the Lines: Literary Transnationalism and African American Poetics

Monique-Adelle Callahan

This book maintains that the poetic texts examined here constitute an active process of composing history; they are not simply historicized. They give name to the nation and compose of a historical ... More

This book maintains that the poetic texts examined here constitute an active process of composing history; they are not simply historicized. They give name to the nation and compose of a historical narrative for its denizens. They are literary artifacts, bearing the vestiges of the past while provoking new interpretations. As visionaries and composers of New World history, Frances Harper, Cristina Ayala and Auta de Souza are a part of a larger process of conceptualizing freedom in the New World. Frances Harper’s trans-hemispheric poetic gestures delimit the scope of this project. By exemplifying the kind of readings that can evolve from following one poet’s trans-hemispheric allusions and articulate the fundamentally transnational aspect of African American literature in the United States, and inspire more re-evaluations of trans-hemispheric literary currents across national boundaries in afrodescendente literatures. The spectre of race and its particular performances of gender identities among afrodescendente peoples in the New World, informs these poetics but does not conform them to a monolithic body of national literature. Afrodescendente poetry in the Americas highlights the power of words to imagine new histories and new forms of identity. In their interplay, the poems tell us certain truths about how the concept of freedom can evolve. They say: “Freedom” cannot be understood as a byproduct of slavery’s abolition. They say: Freedom is a poetic process. They say: Freedom cannot just be legislated, it has to be written.Less

Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995

Cheryl Higashida

This book examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely ... More

This book examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely overlooked feminist tradition built upon and critically retheorized the postwar Left's “nationalist internationalism,” which connected the liberation of Blacks in the United States to the liberation of Third World nations and the worldwide proletariat. Exploring a diverse range of plays, novels, essays, poetry, and reportage, the book shows how Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou worked within and against established literary forms to demonstrate that nationalist internationalism was linked to struggles against heterosexism and patriarchy. In examining writing by Black Left women from 1945 to 1995, this book contributes to recent efforts to rehistoricize the Old Left, Civil Rights, Black Power, and second-wave Black women's movements.Less

Book for the Hour of Recreation

Maria de San Jose Salazar

Alison Weber (ed.)

María de San José Salazar (1548–1603) took the veil as a Discalced (“barefoot”) Carmelite nun in 1571, becoming one of Teresa of Avila's most important collaborators in religious reform and serving ... More

María de San José Salazar (1548–1603) took the veil as a Discalced (“barefoot”) Carmelite nun in 1571, becoming one of Teresa of Avila's most important collaborators in religious reform and serving as prioress of the Seville and Lisbon convents. Within the parameters of the strict Catholic Reformation in Spain, she fiercely defended women's rights to define their own spiritual experience and to teach, inspire, and lead other women in reforming their church. María wrote this book as a defense of the Discalced practice of setting aside two hours each day for conversation, music, and the staging of religious plays. Casting the book in the form of a dialogue, she demonstrates through fictional conversations among a group of nuns during their hours of recreation how women could serve as very effective spiritual teachers for each other. The book includes one of the first biographical portraits of Teresa and María's personal account of the troubled founding of the Discalced convent at Seville, as well as María's tribulations as an Inquisitional suspect. Rich in allusions to women's affective relationships in the early modern convent, it also serves as an example of how a woman might write when relatively free of clerical censorship and expectations.Less

Cannibal Writes: Eating Others in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Women's Writing

Njeri Githire

Postcolonial and diaspora studies scholars and critics have paid increasing attention to the use of metaphors of food, eating, digestion, and various affiliated actions such as loss of appetite, ... More

Postcolonial and diaspora studies scholars and critics have paid increasing attention to the use of metaphors of food, eating, digestion, and various affiliated actions such as loss of appetite, indigestion, and regurgitation. As such stylistic devices proliferated in the works of non-Western women writers, scholars connected metaphors of eating and consumption to colonial and imperial domination. This book concentrates on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of these visceral metaphors of consumption in works by women writers from Haiti, Jamaica, Mauritius, and elsewhere. Employing theoretical analysis and insightful readings of English- and French-language texts, the book explores the prominence of alimentary-related tropes and their relationship to sexual consumption, writing, global geopolitics and economic dynamics, and migration. As the book shows, the use of cannibalism in particular as a central motif opens up privileged modes for mediating historical and sociopolitical issues. Ambitiously comparative, the book ranges across the works of well-known and lesser-known writers to tie together two geographic and cultural spaces that have much in common but are seldom studied in parallel.Less

The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic

Olympia Morata

A brilliant scholar and one of the finest writers of her day, Olympia Fulvia Morata (1526–1555) was attacked by some as a “Calvinist Amazon” but praised by others as an inspiration to all learned ... More

A brilliant scholar and one of the finest writers of her day, Olympia Fulvia Morata (1526–1555) was attacked by some as a “Calvinist Amazon” but praised by others as an inspiration to all learned women. This book publishes all her known writings—orations, dialogues, letters, and poems—in an English translation. Raised in the court of Ferrara in Italy, Morata was educated alongside the daughters of the nobility. As a youth she gave public lectures on Cicero, wrote commentaries on Homer, and composed poems, dialogues, and orations in both Latin and Greek. Morata also became a prominent Protestant evangelical, studying the Bible extensively and corresponding with many of the leading theologians of the Reformation. After fleeing to Germany in search of religious freedom, she tutored students in Greek and composed what many at the time felt were her finest works: a series of translations of the Psalms into Greek hexameters and sapphics.Less

Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England

Susan Wiseman

What was the relationship between woman and politics in seventeenth century England? Responding to this question, Conspiracy and Virtue argues that theoretical exclusion of women from the political ... More

What was the relationship between woman and politics in seventeenth century England? Responding to this question, Conspiracy and Virtue argues that theoretical exclusion of women from the political sphere shaped their relation to it. Rather than producing silence, this exclusion generated rich, complex, and oblique political involvements which this study traces through the writings of both men and women. Pursuing this argument, Conspiracy and Virtue engages the main writings on women's relationship to the political sphere including debates on the public sphere and on contract theory. Writers and figures discussed include many authors who are not often studied together, such as Elizabeth Avery, Aphra Behn, Anne Bradstreet, Maragret Cavendish, Queen Christina of Sweden, Anne Halkett, Brilliana Harley, Lucy Hutchinson, John Milton, Elizabeth Poole, Sara Wight, and Henry Jessey.Less

Contemporary Feminism and Women's Short Stories

Emma Young

The short story has received renewed attention and notable popular acclaim in the twenty-first century. This book offers a wide-ranging survey of contemporary women’s short stories and introduces a ... More

The short story has received renewed attention and notable popular acclaim in the twenty-first century. This book offers a wide-ranging survey of contemporary women’s short stories and introduces a new way of theorising feminism in the genre through the concept of ‘the moment’. By considering the prominent themes of motherhood, marriage, domesticity, sexuality, masculinity and femininity, this work engages with a spectrum of issues that are central to feminism today and, in the process, offers insightful new readings of the contemporary short story. Readers will find new perspectives on both canonical as well as lesser-discussed contemporary writers, including Kate Atkinson, Nicola Barker, A.S. Byatt, Aminatta Forna, Victoria Hislop, Jackie Kay, Andrea Levy, Hilary Mantel, Kate Mosse, Michèle Roberts, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith and Rose Tremain. While serving as a comprehensive introduction to the central themes of feminist politics, the study shows what makes the short story a desirable literary vehicle for creatively and critically contributing to feminist debates.Less

Convent Autobiography: Early Modern English Nuns in Exile

Victoria Van Hyning

Convent Autobiography explores the ways in which cloistered women articulated their senses of self through genres such as letters, chronicles, accounts, guidance and devotional manuals, and ... More

Convent Autobiography explores the ways in which cloistered women articulated their senses of self through genres such as letters, chronicles, accounts, guidance and devotional manuals, and conversion narratives. The book explores writings by early modern English women who elected a double self-exile from home and ‘from the world’, undertakings that shaped and informed so much of their self-writing. These nuns sometimes composed under their own names, but many composed anonymously. Using a combination of close reading, palaeography, manuscript evidence and other data, this book reveals the identities of half a dozen women, including descendants of Sir Thomas More, whose contributions to English literature and history were hitherto unknown. Although anonymous composition was in keeping with monastic norms of humility, Convent Autobiography argues anonymity offered paradoxical freedoms, such as enabling an author to write extensively about her own family, and herself, or to present institutional narratives through the lens of her own experiences. Three case studies devoted to anonymous chronicling reveal the complexity of authorial strategies of self and communal representation. On the basis of these, two new genres of autobiography are proposed: anonymous and subsumed autobiography. These definitions have wider application beyond convent and early modern literature. The book includes a complete edition of the vibrant conversion narrative, lists, and prayers of Catherine Holland, who defied her Protestant father by running away to join the convent of Nazareth where she could practise Catholicism and ‘escape the slavery of marriage’.Less

Cornelia Sorabji: India's Pioneering Woman Lawyer

Suparna Gooptu

This book presents the biography of Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954), the first woman to study law at Oxford. A Parsee and daughter of a converted Christian, Cornelia was among the early Indian women to ... More

This book presents the biography of Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954), the first woman to study law at Oxford. A Parsee and daughter of a converted Christian, Cornelia was among the early Indian women to practice at the Calcutta High Court. Appointed to a senior office under the British Indian government, she championed the cause of opening up the legal profession to women much before they were formally allowed to plead before the courts of law. Her story as a pioneer remains largely untold till date. Characterized by conservatism, individualism, and feelings against Indian nationalism, Cornelia was one of the early woman legal professionals in India who played a pivotal role in protecting the interests of the purdahnashins.Less

The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes

Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Rene Descartes

Between the years 1643 and 1649, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–80) and René Descartes (1596–1650) exchanged fifty-eight letters—thirty-two from Descartes and twenty-six from Elisabeth. Their ... More

Between the years 1643 and 1649, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–80) and René Descartes (1596–1650) exchanged fifty-eight letters—thirty-two from Descartes and twenty-six from Elisabeth. Their correspondence contains the only known extant philosophical writings by Elisabeth, revealing her mastery of metaphysics, analytic geometry, and moral philosophy, as well as her keen interest in natural philosophy. The letters are essential reading for anyone interested in Descartes's philosophy, in particular his account of the human being as a union of mind and body, as well as his ethics. They also provide an insight into the character of their authors, and the way ideas develop through intellectual collaboration. Philosophers have long been familiar with Descartes's side of the correspondence. Elisabeth's letters add context and depth both to Descartes's ideas and the legacy of the princess. This annotated edition also includes Elisabeth's correspondence with the Quakers William Penn and Robert Barclay.Less

Curious Subjects: Women and the Trials of Realism

Hilary M. Schor

Curious Subjects focuses on the relationship between women, curiosity, and the rise of the novel, using the lenses of scientific, legal, and “fictional” curiosity to examine the changing ... More

Curious Subjects focuses on the relationship between women, curiosity, and the rise of the novel, using the lenses of scientific, legal, and “fictional” curiosity to examine the changing definitions of the subject within these various discourses. Texts range from eighteenth-century fiction to classic Victorian “heroine texts,” to contemporary revisions of realist forms, with an emphasis on the always-doubled and duplicitous nature of both female curiosity and the realist project. The book rethinks the question of female knowledge from within the form of the novel, using not just the metaphor but the history of curiosity after the Enlightenment. It begins with the wanderings of curiosity from medieval pilgrims’ relics to private collections to public museums, and interweaves this history with the origins of the modern legal subject, arguing that the most intriguing version of that subject is the curious heroine. So, from the beginning of the book, the rise of the novel, the evolution of curiosity, and the enfranchisement of women are deeply intertwined. Central literary figures include Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Henry James, with examples ranging from Paradise Lost and Clarissa to The Sadeian Woman and The Handmaid’s Tale, from Freud to Bluebeard’s wife.Less

Debate of the Romance of the Rose

Christine de Pizan

In 1401, Christine de Pizan (1365–1430?), one of the most renowned and prolific woman writers of the Middle Ages, wrote a letter to the provost of Lille criticizing the highly popular and widely read ... More

In 1401, Christine de Pizan (1365–1430?), one of the most renowned and prolific woman writers of the Middle Ages, wrote a letter to the provost of Lille criticizing the highly popular and widely read Romance of the Rose for its blatant and unwarranted misogynistic depictions of women. The debate that ensued, over not only the merits of the treatise but also of the place of women in society, started Europe on the long path to gender parity. Pizan's criticism sparked a continent-wide discussion of issues that is still alive today in disputes about art and morality, especially the civic responsibility of a writer or artist for the works he or she produces. This book collects, along with the debate documents themselves, letters, sermons, and excerpts from other works of Pizan, including one from City of Ladies—her major defense of women and their rights—that give context to this debate. Here, Pizan's supporters and detractors are heard alongside her own formidable, protofeminist voice.Less

Discourse to Lady Lavinia His Daughter

Annibal Guasco

When eleven-year-old Lavinia Guasca began her new life as a lady-in-waiting at the court of Turin, she brought with her a parting gift from her father Annibal (1540–1619): a detailed guidebook he ... More

When eleven-year-old Lavinia Guasca began her new life as a lady-in-waiting at the court of Turin, she brought with her a parting gift from her father Annibal (1540–1619): a detailed guidebook he wrote to help steer her through the many pitfalls of court life. Lavinia had her father's Discourse published in 1586. The Discourse displays an incredibly far-sighted view of women's education. Annibal thought gifted young girls should develop their talents and apply them to careers outside the home. In the Discourse, he details the unique and extremely rigorous educational program to which he had subjected Lavinia almost from the cradle with this end in mind. To complete Lavinia's education, Annibal filled the Discourse with advice on spirituality and morality, health and beauty, and how to behave at court—everything a well-bred lady-in-waiting would need to know. This edition also includes an appendix that traces the later events of Lavinia's life through excerpts from her father's letters.Less

Doris Lessing and the Forming of History

Kevin Brazil, David Sergeant, and Tom Sperlinger (eds)

The death of Nobel Prize-winning Doris Lessing sparked a range of commemorations that cemented her place as one of the major figures of twentieth- and twenty-first- century world literature. This ... More

The death of Nobel Prize-winning Doris Lessing sparked a range of commemorations that cemented her place as one of the major figures of twentieth- and twenty-first- century world literature. This volume views Lessing’s writing as a whole and in retrospect, focusing on her innovative attempts to rework literary form to engage with the challenges thrown up by the sweeping historical changes through which she lived. Contributors provide new readings of Lessing’s work via contexts ranging from post-war youth politics and radical women’s writing to European cinema, analyse her experiments with genres from realism to autobiography and science-fiction, and draw on previously unstudied archive material. The volume also explores how Lessing’s writing can provide insight into some of the issues now shaping twenty-first century scholarship – including trauma, ecocriticism, the post-human, and world literature – as they emerge as defining challenges to our own present moment in history.Less

Early Feminists of Colonial India: Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

Bharati Ray

This book is a story of two outstanding Bengali women fighting for a cause, so similar and yet so strikingly different at multiple levels. It presents a historical evaluation of Sarala Devi ... More

This book is a story of two outstanding Bengali women fighting for a cause, so similar and yet so strikingly different at multiple levels. It presents a historical evaluation of Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. It specifically determines the similarities and differences in the ideas and activities of these women from two different communities in colonial Bengal, Hindu-Brahmo and Muslim, and thus also sheds some light on contemporary Hindu and Muslim societies, their patterns of change during the colonial encounter, and the emergence among both the communities of a new generation of women. It concentrates on their concern and work around women’s issues. It first introduces the lives of Sarala and Rokeya. It then investigates the steps Sarala and Rokeya advocated or adopted to enhance the lives of women. It concludes by addressing how their contemporaries viewed Sarala and Rokeya, and how are they regarded today.Less