Sister's Choice - Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing. The Clarendon Lectures 1989 (Hardcover, New)

The title of this collection of essays (some delivered as lectures at Oxford in 1989) refers to a quilting pattern - the image, as Showalter (English/Princeton; Sexual Anarchy, 1990, etc.) explains, that best describes women's literature in America: its communal and ritual nature, its continuity, its diversity, its history as a domestic art that lapsed into disrepute before being resurrected into a high art in the 60's. Showalter's dual preoccupation with the role of women writers and the special identity of American literature appears in the first essay, "Miranda's Story," describing the way various American subcultures have appropriated The Tempest - the role of Miranda, the Dark Lady, Shakespeare's sister - as played by American women, the prototype being Margaret Fuller. In successive chapters on Alcott's Little Women, Chopin's The Awakening, and Wharton's The House of Mirth, Showalter identifies the distinctive voices, values, preoccupations, "hybridity" of American women's writing that makes any question of being Shakespeare's sister irrelevant. And in an astute chapter on what she calls "women's gothic," she further explores the contributions of women writers to the dominant male culture. Even in her chapter on the lost generation of women writers of the 20's - poets such as Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, and Elinor Wylie, and Afro-Americans such as Zora Neale Hurston - she finds, in spite of the exclusion, victimization, and repression, a "literary history of female mastery and growth." Persuasive, ranging, perceptive, unpolemical, Showalter here offers a splendid example of humanistic writing, of her own "female mastery and growth," a genuine contribution to contemporary thinking about women's literature. Her flaw: excessive quoting of scholars who don't write as well as she does, illustrating merely that she has done her homework. (Kirkus Reviews)

Drawing on a wide range of writers and texts, Elaine Showalter argues that post-colonial as well as feminist literary theory can help us understand the complex forms of American women's wriitng, and the way that `women's culture' intersects with other cultural forms.

General

Imprint:	Clarendon Press
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	September 1991
First published:	November 1991
Authors:	Elaine Showalter (Professor of English)
Dimensions:	223 x 140 x 17mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	208
Edition:	New
ISBN-13:	978-0-19-812383-5
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > General Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Gender studies > Women's studies > Feminism
LSN:	0-19-812383-3
Barcode:	9780198123835

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