I here and there o'heard a Coxcomb cry,
Ah, rot--'tis a Woman's Comedy.
Thus Aphra Behn ushers in a new era for women in the British Theatre (Sir Patient Fancy, 1678). In the hundred years that were to follow -- and exactly those years that Curtain Calls examines -- women truly took the theater world by storm.
For each woman who chose a career in the theater world of the eighteenth century, there is a unique tale of struggle, insult, success, good or bad fortune, disaster, seduction, or fame. Whether acting, writing, reviewing, or stage managing, women played a major, if frequently unacknowledged, role in the history of the theater from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. From Alpha Behn's earliest plays through the glorious celebrity of Sara Siddons, women molded the taste of the age and carved out in the theater one of the few available opportunities for independence and renown.
Not all the women who tried succeeded, of course, and even the best faced opposition as they challenged the male stronghold of playwriting and theater managing. Curtain Calls maps the new territory as these pioneering women staked it for their own; it chronicles their lives, their triumphs, and their losses.
We begin with Aphra Behn, whose first play was staged in 1670, and conclude in the early decades of the nineteenth century with Inchbald and Siddons. The one hundred and fifty years encompassed by their lives contain the careers of dozens of lesser-known women, a network, as Dr. Johnson would have it, encompassing both talent and tribulation.
Contributors include: Edward Langhans, Linda R. Payne, Pat Rogers, Maureen e. Mulvihill, Deborah Payne, Betty Rizzo, Ellen Donkin, Frances M. Kavenik, Jessica Munns, nancy Cotton, Edna L. Steevs, Doreen Saar, Jean B. Kern, Katherine M. Rogers, Constance Clark, William J. Burling, Judith Phillips Stanton, Douglas Butler, Rose Zimbardo, and the editors.

Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism is the first book to examine the connections linking two major American writers of the twentieth century, Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway. In twelve critical essays, accompanied by a foreword from Wharton scholar Laura Rattray and a critical introduction by volume editor Lisa Tyler, contributors reveal the writers' overlapping contexts, interests, and aesthetic techniques. Thematic sections highlight modernist trends found in each author's works. To begin, Peter Hays and Ellen Andrews Knodt argue for reading Wharton as a modernist writer, noting how her works feature characteristics that critics customarily credit to a younger generation of writers, including Hemingway. Since Wharton and Hemingway each volunteered for humanitarian medical service in World War I, then drew upon their experiences in subsequent literary works, Jennifer Haytock and Milena Radeva-Costello analyze their powerful perspectives on the cataclysmic conflict traditionally viewed as marking the advent of modernism in literature. In turn, Cecilia Macheski and Sirpa Salenius consider the authors' passionate representations of Italy, informed by personal sojourns there, in which they observed its beautiful landscapes and culture, its liberating contrast with the United States, and its period of fascist politics. Linda Wagner-Martin, Lisa Tyler, and Anna Green focus on the complicated gender politics embedded in the works of Wharton and Hemingway, as evidenced in their ideas about female agency, sexual liberation, architecture, and modes of transportation. In the collection's final section, Dustin Faulstick, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman, and Parley Ann Boswell address suggestive intertextualities between the two authors with respect to the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, their serialized publications in Scribner's Magazine, and their affinities with the literary and cinematic tradition of noir. Together, the essays in this engaging collection prove that comparative studies of Wharton and Hemingway open new avenues for understanding the pivotal aesthetic and cultural movements central to the development of American literary modernism.

More than thirty stories, plays, poems, and songs featuring the making of quilts--written from 1845 to the present, mainly by American women--document women's literary history. Featuring the work of Bobbie Ann Mason, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Walker, Sharyn McCrumb, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, and many others, Quilt Stories is a colorful literary album of stories, poems, and plays that celebrate quilting as a pattern in women's history. These stories -- grouped under the themes of memory, courtship, struggle, mystery, and wisdom -- reflect the importance of quilting in the lives of American women, not only as a practical craft and a creative outlet, but also as an integral part of the social community.