The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature

A collaborative, up-to-the-minute account of American literature written by women, from pre-colonial times to the present.

Dale M. Bauer (Edited by)

9781108748339, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 July 2021

712 pages, 9 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.2 x 3.8 cm, 1.1 kg

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.

Introduction Dale M. Bauer
1. The stories we tell: American Indian women's writing and the persistence of tradition Jodi A. Byrd
2. Women writers and war Jonathan Vincent
3. American women's writing in the Colonial period Kirstin R. Wilcox
4. Religion, sensibility, and sympathy Sandra M. Gustafson
5. Women's writing of the Revolutionary era Jennifer J. Baker
6. Women writers and the early US novel Andy Doolen
7. Women in literary culture during the long nineteenth century Nancy Glazener
8. Moral authority as literary property in mid-century print culture Susan M. Ryan
9. The shape of Catharine Sedgwick's career Melissa J. Homestead
10. Writing, authorship and genius: literary women and modes of literary production Susan S. Williams
11. Nineteenth-century American women's poetry: past and prospects Elizabeth Renker
12. Transatlantic sympathies and nineteenth-century women writing Susan David Bernstein
13. Nineteenth-century African American women writers John Ernest
14. Local knowledge and regional women's writing Stephanie Foote
15. Women and children first: female writers of American children's literature Carol Singley
16. US suffrage literature Mary Chapman
17. American women playwrights Brenda Murphy
18. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century transitions: women on the edge of tomorrow Stephanie Smith
19. Women's writing and naturalism: accidents and agency Jennifer Travis
20. The geography of ladyhood: racializing the novel of manners Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
21. Self-made women: novelists of the 1920s Jean M. Lutes
22. Recovering the legacy of Zara Wright and the twentieth-century black woman writer Rynetta Davis
23. Jewish American women writers Hana Wirth-Nesher
24. Women on the breadlines John Marsh
25. Modern domestic realism in America, 1950–1970 Gordon Hutner
26. Lyric, gender and subjectivity in modern and contemporary poetry Jennifer Ashton
27. Contemporary American women's writing: women and violence Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson
28. Asian-American women's literature and the promise of committed art Leslie Bow
29. Straight sex, queer text: American women novelists Lynda Zwinger
30. Latina writers and the usable past Kimberly O'Neill
31. Where is she? Women/access/rhetoric Patricia Bizzell
32. Reading women in America Susan M. Griffin
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS]