Product Description

Women have had a complex experience in African American culture. The first work of its kind, this encyclopedia approaches African American literature from a Women's Studies perspective. While Yolanda Williams Page's Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers provides biographical entries on more than 150 literary figures, this book is much broader in scope. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries on African American women writers, as well as on male writers who have treated women in their works. Entries on genres, periods, themes, characters, historical events, texts, places, and other topics are included as well. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and relates its subject to the overall experience of women in African American literature. Entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography.

African American culture is enormously diverse, and the experience of women in African American society is especially complex. Women were among the first African American writers, and works by black women writers are popular among students and general readers alike. At the same time, African American women have been oppressed, and texts by black male authors represent women in a variety of ways. The first of its kind, this encyclopedia approaches African American literature from a Women's Studies perspective, and thus significantly illuminates the African American cultural experience through literary works.

Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries, written by numerous expert contributors. In addition to covering male and female African American authors, the encyclopedia also discusses themes, major works and characters, genres, periods, historical events, places, and other topics.

Included are entries on such authors as:

; Maya Angelou

; James Baldwin

; Frederick Douglass

; Nikki Giovanni

; June Jordan

; Claude McKay

; Ishmael Reed

; Sojourner Truth

; Phillis Wheatley

; And many others.

In addition, the many works discussed include:

; Beloved

; Blanche on the Lam

; Iknow Why the Caged Bird Sings

; The Men of Brewster Place

; Quicksand

; The Street

; Waiting to Exhale

; And many more.

The many topical entries cover:

; Black Feminism

; Black Nationalism

; Conjuring

; Children's and Young Adult Literature

; Detective Fiction

; Epistolary Novel

; Motherhood

; Sexuality

; Spirituality

; Stereotypes

; And many others.

Entries relate their topics to the experience of African American women and cite works for further reading.

Features and Benefits:

; Includes hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries.

; Draws on the work of numerous expert contributors.

; Includes a selected, general bibliography.

; Offers a range of finding aids, such as a list of entries, a guide to related topics, and an extensive index.

; Supports the literature curriculum by helping students analyze major writers and works.

; Supports the social studies curriculum by helping students use literature to understand the experience of African American women.

; Covers the full chronological range of African American literature.

; Fosters a respect for cultural diversity.

; Develops research skills by directing students to additional sources of information.

; Builds bridges between African American history, literature, and Women's Studies.

Customer Reviews (1)

A community of caring
I am a teacher and I thought an empathetic person.I thought my own experiences and ability to self reflect and learn from others enabled me to be insightful, understanding and supportive.I was wrong.So many thoughts are never spoken.So many experiences are not shared.

Some of the narratives took me on a journey into familar territory; giving voice to my personal feelings.How amazing to know that others have felt my feelings.To be part of a sisterhood.To know that I am not alone.

Other narratives described pain and recovery; strength and persevance beyond anything I could have imagined.I am grateful to the authors forcompiling these works; for empowering women to speak unspeakable thoughts; for permitting people like me to learn and to grow.


... Read more

Product Description
Providing an overview of the history of writing by women in the period, this companion examines contextually the work of a variety of women writers, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis and Louisa May Alcott. The volume provides several valuable tools for students, including a chronology of works and suggestions for further reading. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Brilliant Feminist Overview
This is a brilliant intervention in the study of American literature written by one of the smartest, women academics out there.Wonderful in its contextualization of 19th-century American women writers, this book is well-organized, comprehensive and lively.Please don't be daunted by fact-checker wannabes.This is great stuff, for both students and those who would like a women writers compendium on hand.

Caveat lector:do NOT buy this book
I began reading this book with great anticipation, looking forward to a pleasant evening learning more about a sadly-neglected subject; women's writing in 19th century America.

About two thirds down the first page of the historical timeline, one eyebrow went up.Three seconds later the other eyebrow joined the first eyebrow.By page 20 I was ready to ask for my money back.

This book is riddled with so many errors of fact, grammar and spelling (a character in one of Mrs. E.D. E. N. Southworth's novels is described as "fighting duals")that I can't believe it made it past the fact-checker and the copy-editor. I have to ask myself the question:If the editors couldn't be bothered to catch these minor, silly mistakes, how can I have any confidence that the rest of the information they are imparting is accurate?

Messrs Bauer and Gould should be ashamed of themselves for allowing such a slipshod piece of work to make it into print. ... Read more

Product Description
is the first major anthology in English to highlight the contributions of women to modern literary culture with respect to the heated gender debates of early twentieth-century China. Featuring examples of fiction, drama, autobiography, essays, and poetry by eighteen writers, many of whom have been neglected by mainstream literary history, this collection demonstrates the creative diversity in modern women's writing. The editors' introduction charts key developments in the study of gender, literature, and women's writing in modern China and provides an overview of the relevant historical events of this century's first three decades. From Qiu Jin's experimental narrative , one of the earliest fictional representations of women's liberation from the traditional Confucian family, to Bing Xin's "Our Mistress's Parlor," which presents a satire of an intellectual salon in 1930s Shanghai,offers an unrivaled opportunity to explore an important body of imaginative work. ... Read more

Product Description
"Domestic Modernism, the Interwar Novel, and E. H. Young" provides a valuable analytical model for reading a large body of modernist works by women, who have suffered not only from a lack of critical attention but also from the assumption that experimental modernist techniques are the only expression of the modern. In the process of documenting the publication and reception history of E. H. Young's novels, the authors suggest a paradigm for analyzing the situation of women writers during the interwar years. Their discussion of Young in the context of both canonical and noncanonical writers challenges the generic label and literary status of the domestic novel, as well as facile assumptions about popular and middlebrow fiction, canon formation, aesthetic value, and modernity. The authors also make a significant contribution to discussions of the everyday and to the burgeoning field of 'homeculture,' as they show that the fictional embodiment and inscription of home by writers such as Young, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Lettice Cooper, E. M. Delafield, Stella Gibbons, Storm Jameson, and E.Arnot Robertson epitomizes the longstanding symbiosis between architecture and literature, or more specifically, between the house and the novel. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Must for Feminist & Literary Theory
This amazing books gives readers the ability to scrutinize literary texts from a feminist perspective.Cixous clearly lays out her arguments and offers a unique perspective on the struggle of woman and how she is seen by the rest of the world.This book is a must for any Women's Studies or English major. ... Read more

Product Description
Hither, at the close of the year 1820, came a woman, still young, well known in Paris for her charm, her fair face, and her wit; and to the immense astonishment of the little village a mile away, this woman of high rank and corresponding fortune took up her abode at Saint-Lange. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

TERRIBLE BINDING!
I have two reviews for this book, but the most essential piece of information I can offer is that this book is very shoddily made - upon reading the book only once, it now looks like a well loved used book. Sections of pages cracked right out of the binding. Also, the edition has some strange text/typing issues which didn't bother me as much, but by all means spring for the other, slightly more expensive version.

I won't expound with a full review here, however this book is worth reading, especially to die-hard Balzac fans (of which I'm one). Learning that the piece was culled from unrelated stories made the somewhat shaky plot lines defensible, but it's strength is in just a few fantastic passages on women and age. A short read with some gems of prose - and how can you beat plot twists involving pirate queens? You'll see . . .

A woman of thirty
I love French literature and Balzac has an extraordinary insight into human nature.I always wanted to read this book however the translationis not the best.

Life in 19th century bourgeois France
Balzac guided European fiction away from the overriding influence of Walter Scott and the Gothic school, by showing that modern life could be recounted as vividly as Scott recounted his historical tales, and that mystery and intrigue did not need ghosts and crumbling castles for props. Maupassant, Flaubert and Zola were writers of the next generation who were directly influenced by him, and Marcel Proust (that other weaver of a great tapestry) acknowledged his influence.

He is worth reading for pleasure as well as for his influence on European literature.

Humanism and frivolity?
Balzac spent 16 years to write this book -trought 1828 to 1844 and it's divided in 6 parts. The first 3 goes to the middle of the tale and the narrative is deep and focused on the france social life trought the beginning of the XIX century.

Balzac shows in those firsts chapters a lot of questions about society and moralism, showing a good view trought humanism and the cruel place of a woman on society at that time. Altought the reader get inside trought the life of Julie, her bad marriage and her deisires for love, the narrator is always telling us the problems surrounding the emancipation of a woman. "The purity of a woman is not compatible with society's obligations and freedom. To emancipate women means corrupt them". It sounds like Balzac agree with the terms of society.

In the last 3 chapters the narrative get more dinamic and more superficial. Like a "blue library" tale. Those romantic -like a sugar cam- tale. So Balzac broke the rhithm of narrative. It really appears like a mistake. Another mistakes are the change of narrator focus - from 3th to 1th- on the 4th chapter, and the last mistake is some problems with time rhithm: in one page the history is on 1920, for example, and 20 or 30 pages after, passed 4 years on the narrative it starts like "it was summer 1921"...

Would Balzac made those mistakes? Or would it be on purpose? The author made a lot of questions trought society's frivolity and humanism. Those mistakes wouldn't be a way of showing critizing over morality trought society? These are some question that I have in mind... Would be Balzac superficial, ignoring those mistakes? Or would it be an ironic and slight way of showing his questions trought society? ... Read more

Product Description
Asian American women have long dealt with charges of betrayal within and beyond their communities. Images of their "disloyalty" pervade American culture, from the daughter who is branded a traitor to family for adopting American ways, to the war bride who immigrates in defiance of her countrymen, to a figure such as Yoko Ono, accused of breaking up the Beatles with her "seduction" of John Lennon. Leslie Bow here explores how representations of females transgressing the social order play out in literature by Asian American women. Questions of ethnic belonging, sexuality, identification, and political allegiance are among the issues raised by such writers as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Bharati Mukherjee, Jade Snow Wong, Amy Tan, Sky Lee, Le Ly Hayslip, Wendy Law-Yone, Fiona Cheong, and Nellie Wong. Beginning with the notion that feminist and Asian American identity are mutually exclusive, Bow analyzes how women serve as boundary markers between ethnic or national collectives in order to reveal the male-based nature of social cohesion.

In exploring the relationship between femininity and citizenship, liberal feminism and American racial discourse, and women's domestic abuse and human rights, the author suggests that Asian American women not only mediate sexuality's construction as a determiner of loyalty but also manipulate that construction as a tool of political persuasion in their writing. The language of betrayal, she argues, offers a potent rhetorical means of signaling how belonging is policed by individuals and by the state. Bow's bold analysis exposes the stakes behind maintaining ethnic, feminist, and national alliances, particularly for women who claim multiple loyalties. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

smart and helpful
Smart stuff. I found this book especially lucid because it nicely integrates "theory" with sharp textual readings of Asian American texts. And it's just not some static application of race or gender theory that Bow uses. She instead makes original use of different ethnic contexts, psychoanalysis, political history to bring AsAm lit into a wider theoretical context.
This book is big help in thinking about what I want to do this year (my senior year!) for my thesis. ... Read more

Product Description
In this innovative study, Bernadette Andrea focuses on the contributions of women and their writings in the early modern cultural encounters between England and the Islamic world. She examines previously neglected material, such as the diplomatic correspondence between Queen Elizabeth I and the Ottoman Queen Mother Safiye at the end of the sixteenth century, and resituates canonical accounts, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's travelogue of the Ottoman empire at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Her study advances our understanding of how women negotiated conflicting discourses of gender, orientalism, and imperialism at a time when the Ottoman empire was hugely powerful and England was still a marginal nation with limited global influence. This book is a significant contribution to critical and theoretical debates in literary and cultural, postcolonial, women's, and Middle Eastern studies. ... Read more

Product Description
Amazing historical novel about a leggless woman named Mamie.

Charleston's most bizarre street vendor, Mamie, plied her trade for perhaps fifty years without missing a beat.She had no legs, yet triumphed over every obstacle. Read more; ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Heart Wrenching Novel!!
From the moment you open this book you are captured by the characters. You become one with them as they take their awesome journey through life. Through Ms. Bowles amazing talent for character description you can see the characters clearly in your mind. You can laugh with them and cry with them.What a wonderful talent Ms.Bowles possesses to be able to put you in the book with all the awsome people that abide there.

Highly recommended.
Written by veteran teacher Elizabeth Bowles, Mamie and the Root Woman is a novel based on the true story of a young girl who was almost murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. In 1879, years after the Civil War, the Klan murders fifteen-year-old Mamie's mother and severs Mamie's legs. Yet with the help of the mysterious voodoo practitioner Root Woman and a repentant former Klansman, Mamie gradually heals, makes her way to Charleston, and discovers a surprising new life. Mamie and the Root Woman is a profound story of connections, recovery from inhuman treatment, and finding the inner strength to withstand life's seemingly unbearable challenges. Highly recommended.

Enthralling
A very moving, very eye-opening book.Readers are transported to a different time and yet the spirited characters and their struggles are, in a way, timeless.It's been a long time since a story this beautiful and this original has been put into print.

Great first novel
Elizabeth Bowles has done some serious research for this book. The dialogue between the characters makes you feel as if you are actually hearing these people speak. She has tackled a most unusual topic with the subject matter of the novel, yet once you start reading, you can't put the book down until the end. It is certainly different from any book out there today.

The South, Voodoo, Racial Relationships
Mamie, a young black woman, loses her legs at the hands of terrorism inflicted by the Klu Klux Klan.After the incident Mamie is nursed back to health by Root Woman, who specializes in herbs and voodoo.Set in the deep south, this book deals with the relationships within the town, including a forbidden love story between a white man and a black woman at a time when this was not acceptable. You can tell the author has done some serious research into the subjects covered. In addition, though, the story line makes you want to keep reading. If these are topics that interest you, you will want to get this book. ... Read more

Product Description
This portrait of American women reveals the remarkable strengths and resources of ordinary women. Excerpts from 29 diaries include miniatures of the daily life of New England families in the late 1700s, overviews of the great expansion westward, and devastating portraits of the brutal politics of the 1960s and 1970s. The book also contains a bibliography of hundreds of women’s diaries. ... Read more

Product Description
The first full length treatment of how men of different professions, social ranks and ages are empowered by their emotional expressiveness in early modern English literary works, this study examines the profound impact of the cultural shift in the English aristocracy from feudal warriors to emotionally expressive courtiers or gentlemen on all kinds of men in early modern English literature. Jennifer Vaught bases her analysis on the epic, lyric, and romance as well as on drama, pastoral writings and biography, by Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Jonson and Garrick among other writers. Offering new readings of these works, she traces the gradual emergence of men of feeling during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the blossoming of this literary version of manhood during the eighteenth century. ... Read more

Product Description
Nominee for the National Book Award, this collection of literarycriticism considers the careers of women writers as well as therepresentation of women in literature. Included are essays on the workof Virginia Woolf, the Brontes, and Sylvia Plath. [Hardwick's] superbwriting is a rare gift to the reader. ... Read more

Product Description
From warrior women to female deities who control the cycleof life, female characters in Native American literatureexhibit a social and spiritual empowerment that is quitedifferent from the average Pocahontas we are used to seeing in mainstream literature. This work argues that a tribalconstruct of gender relations, where the relationship between male and female roles is complementary rather thanhierarchical, accounts for the existence of these empowered

female characters in Native American literature. Focusing onthe work of four of the twentieth century's most famous Native American authors, Zitkala-Sa, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie, Hollrah suggests that it is important to evaluate Native American literary femalecharacters in a cultural paradigm that is less Euro-Americanand more compatible to the complementarity of NativeAmerican culture. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

A Groundbreaking Study, Now Dated--But Still Worth a Look
READING THE ROMANCE was a groundbreaking study in 1984. As one of the first studies to seriously examine romance reading, it is worth a read for scholars studying popular genre fiction. The first chapter is an invaluable and detailed history of the romance novel--the rise of Harlequin is a fascinating publishing story in particular.

Unfortunately, there are a few caveats. The sample size of readers that were surveyed and interviewed is disturbingly low (41), and all live in the same Midwestern town. The author extrapolates the results of her study with this small group of women into a 200-page book. While it's fascinating, it isn't quite the definitive documentary of romance readers that its subtitle ("Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature") suggests. While romance novels and romance reader demographics have changed considerably in the past 26 years, this remains a good starting point for scholars.

Strongly Feminist
I found the responses of the individuals interviewed interesting, but the analysis rather uninteresting.Unless you are a proponent of feminist theory the authors thoughts and interpretations of the women's reasons for reading romance novels is bound to seem pretty suspect.She does own up to this in the introduction, and the material is still interesting, I just got sick of hearing about patriarchal marriages mighty quick.

Pretentious Over-Analysis
Not being a fan of romance novels, I approached this analysis by Radway from a cultural studies standpoint. This is a relatively informative example from that field, with some reasonably well-defined conclusions about its phenomenon of interest. I have no problem with stipulations that women read romance novels to escape from daily drudgery, to identify with a strong-willed heroine who wins the heart of an ideal man, and even to rebel against their insensitive husbands. Radway could have made these points in a very straightforward manner, but this book takes us on a severely pretentious academic over-analysis, with several methodological problems that make the book difficult to take seriously.

First, I will second the claims by previous reviewer M. Dargan who found that Radway shows little evidence that her pseudonymous town of Smithton really exists, under any name. She maintains that the town is a suburb of 112 thousand people, next to a city of 800 thousand (the last two figures are supposedly from the 1970 census), is in the Midwest, is about 2000 miles from New York City, and is in a state with 115 counties. Do a little research, as M. Dargan did, and you'll find that no location satisfying all five of these descriptions exists. I'm willing to concede that Radway may have made some minor mistakes in description, but should this happen in a book that is so extensively researched otherwise? Meanwhile, except for "Dot" the women profiled in the book appear very homogenous and undifferentiated. Radway's general lack of definition for these women is at least a problem of research methodology, if not outright misrepresentation.

In any case, such questions of method would be of little concern if Radway had stuck to her planned thesis, which is to find out why women read romance novels. However, this book descends into a swamp of rusty Hite-style feminist theories on gender roles and sexuality (especially in the interminable Chapter 4), of the type that are just as unyielding and condescending as the male-oriented conceptions they are rebelling against. Radway even concedes that the women in the study rarely had conceptions of such supposedly deep thoughts. On the other hand, they regularly make the standard claims that men are only thinking of one thing, that husbands are threatened by their wives' reading material, et cetera. They can think these things if they wish, but Radway fails to notice that these are stereotypical categorizations of the type that feminist theory is supposed to counter against. Once again, I have no problem with romance novels or the goals of feminism. However, one must wonder about the true agenda of a researcher who turns a thin cultural study of 42 homogenous women who read romance novels, in a town that may not really exist, into 200+ pages of pretentious theorizing and pontification. (...)

Where is Smithton?
Janice Radway goes to great lengths to describe the town, Smithton, where she claims to have assessed the reading habits of romance novel maven Dorothy "Dot" Evans and her disciples.She then chooses to protect the identities of the group by describing the town as "nearly 2000 miles from New York City, "Midwestern" and "surrounded by corn and hayfields."Furthermore, she places Smithton as a suburb of a town with about 850,000 residents according to the 1970 Census.

I've looked at the 1970 Census and the only town that comes close to 850,000 is Dallas, TX at 844,000.However, while Dallas has many suburbs that could have been Smithton, none of them were surrounded with corn and hayfields and any characterization of the Dallas area as Midwestern would no doubt raise the ire of Texans who consider themselves (even the snowbirds) either Southerners or Westerners.

Furthermore, if you look at a map of the USA and draw a radius 2000 miles from New York City, you're going to be in central Montana, Wyoming, western Colorado, and parts of New Mexico.None of that is Midwestern and there aren't any towns that fit the population estimate.

Has anyone ever identified the "Dot" character and has anyone ever seen proof that Radway's book is based on actual research?Surely, if Dot actually existed she would have exploited the notoriety from the book to promote her newsletter.The whole book is fishy:Her methods, findings, and conclusions are not convincing and her description of Smithton is implausible.

Cheers

Conflict of Interest Makes it Interesting
An interesting book and a pretty good read.With the exception of the first chapter, which is an enlightening but pretty dry history of book publishing, the author writes with an enganging and personable style that's highly unusual for an "academic" book.I picked it up thinking that I'd browse through it and found myself reading it cover to cover.There's a bit of the usual feminist/critical studies rhetoric but it's neither bombastic enough nor pervasive enough to dampen the book's accessibility nor its credibility.

What keeps the book interesting is the author's ongoing engagement with a smallish group of midwestern romance readers.The group makes up the core of her study and she cites interviews with these readers as well as statistical results from a questionnaire.An undercurrent which runs through this book but which Radway doesn't directly address is her conflicted relationship with this group.On the one hand, she is seems to respect them a great deal and doesn't want to dismiss them the way many romance readers have been dismissed as mindless and passive women.Indeed, part of her analysis is that the romance novel is a complex response to power relations between men and women and that it does not simply reinforce the status quo. On the other hand, she seems to suggest that the readers she's interviewed aren't entirely aware of this agenda--that they simply read to escape.

Radway refers over and over again to the idea that the women she's interviewed read romances in order to experience vicariously what they are missing in their lives.She makes a pretty interesting case, but it's significant, I think, that she never asks the women about whether or not they think they are missing anything in their lives. Thus, though interesting, the book takes a sort of, "I know what you really need and why you really read these books even if you don't" mentality.She cares about and respects these women and she listens closely to their experiences and opinions.But she still thinks she knows their motivations better than the readers themselves.I'm not sure it's really so much condescending as conflicted.

It would have been interesting to have Radway actually address this issue with the readers she interviewed or at least in an afterword to the book.I wonder if the women she interviewed read the book and what they thought about it if they did. ... Read more

Product Description
12 hours of Listening!

Features 2 Unabridged Novels and 5 short stories!

Classic Women's Literature is a deluxe audio book collection celebrating some of the most revered classical women authors: Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Louisa May Alcott, and Willa Cather. With 2 unabridged novels, Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen and Madame De Treymes by Edith Wharton, this collection also features 5 short stories from these renowned women, whose stories and characters have become a permanent fixture in classical literature. In the car, while traveling, or simply just at home, this deluxe audio book suite guarantees high quality content for today's time pressed reader.

Northanger Abbey
by Jane Austen

When a young bookworm with a vivid imagination goes on vacation, she falls in love with a clergyman and lets all the images she has read in books cloud her mind with realities. After many misunderstandings (and several unexpected plot twists), this delightful romance is a true Jane Austen classic.

Madame De Treymes
by Edith Wharton

Set in France, enter a world of familial conspiracy. Fanny de Malrive will do anything to keep her child in her custody, including staying in France, which she is not eager to do. But, Monsieur de Malrive and his family want to keep the child, too, and will even lie to get what they want. This exciting story set in the 1800's reveals a very modern family problem, and shows the lengths people will go to in order to keep their family together.

5 short stories:
The Legacy by Virginia Woolf
Happy Women by Louisa May Alcott
Roman Fever by Edith Wharton
The String Quartet by Virginia Woolf
Scandal by Willa Cather ... Read more

Product Description
This reference volume serves as a "companion" to Third World women's literatures in English and in English translation by presenting entries on works, writers, and themes. Entries are chosen to present a balance of well-known writers and emerging ones, contemporary as well as historical writers, and representative selections of genres, literary styles, and themes. ... Read more

Product Description
This collection of essays focuses on the questions of women's access to a written culture and their representation in literature in late medieval Britain. It explores women's engagement with Anglo-Norman, English, Welsh and Latin, and addresses such issues as orality and literacy and women's exclusion from a written tradition.It considers the historical evidence for women's activity as writers, patrons and readers, and examines the representation of women within different literary genres--both secular and religious--their possession or lack of power, and their roles as lovers, mothers and saints. ... Read more