What if the American literary canon were expanded to consistently represent women writers, who do not always fit easily into genres and periods established on the basis of men's writings? How would the study of American literature benefit from this long-needed revision? This timely collection of essays by fourteen women writers breaks new ground in American literary study. Not content to rediscover and awkwardly "fit" female writers into the "white male" scheme of anthologies and college courses, editors Margaret Dickie and Joyce W. Warren question the current boundaries of literary periods, advocating a revised literary canon. The essays consider a wide range of American women writers, including Mary Rowlandson, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Frances Harper, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell and Adrienne Rich, discussing how the present classification of these writers by periods affects our reading of their work. Beyond the focus of feminist challenges to American literary periodization, this volume also studies issues of a need for literary reforms considering differences in race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. The essays are valuable and informative as individual critical studies of specific writers and their works. Challenging Boundaries presents intelligent, original, well-written, and practical arguments in support of long-awaited changes in American literary scholarship and is a milestone of feminist literary study.

Brogan traces in detail the Wallace Stevens increasingly sophisticated use of similes in order to demonstrate how they satisfied both his own intellectual needs and the needs of modern poetry. While thoroughly grounded in the poetry of Stevens, her book also explores the nature of language itself by demonstrating the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of either a romantic or a deconstructive conception of language Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Jacque Vaught Brogan's new collection of poems, Damage, examines a variety of cultural, natural, and personal damages in a lyrical voice ironically marked by intense beauty. This disjunction is precisely what makes the volume so disturbing and yet so tantalizing. The first section, Windows, examines the public sphere of failures and violence, including the simple cyclical decay of nature itself. The next section, Blue Waters, shifts the focus from the public to the personal, in poems frought with betrayal and desire, disillusionment and erotic bondings. In the last section, Notes from the Body, Brogan braids these two spheres into a strikingly original and risky series of poems which fearlessly addresses the modern emotional terrain or what might be called the genuinely body politic.

Brogan traces in detail the Wallace Stevens increasingly sophisticated use of similes in order to demonstrate how they satisfied both his own intellectual needs and the needs of modern poetry. While thoroughly grounded in the poetry of Stevens, her book also explores the nature of language itself by demonstrating the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of either a romantic or a deconstructive conception of language

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), one of the leading poets of the twentieth century, continues to influence a wide range of poets writing today. However, an image persists of Stevens as an aesthete who was politically removed from his times and who also exhibited sexist and racist tendencies. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan offers careful readings from across the Stevens canon to demonstrate that contrary to such enduring earlier assessments, Stevens's work shows poetic and political changes over the years that merge with his growing ethical concerns.

Brogan traces Stevens's evolving poetic practices along three major lines that often intersected. She situates the beginnings of Stevens's development within his early resistance to the pressures of "reality" on the imagination, an artistic stand that pitted him against the "objective" poetry exemplified in the work of William Carlos Williams. In the midst of Stevens's career, World War II moved him forward with new poetic responsibilities both to witness the current world and to guide readers into their future. The emergence of an almost feminist vision defines Stevens's third line of development. Finally, Brogan addresses the subject of Stevens and race, not as a developmental stage but as an undercurrent throughout his work.

According to Brogan, Stevens not only changed but matured over time. What began as an aesthetic "violence within, " or a girding against such "violence without" as social unrest and war, rapidly evolved during Stevens's middle years into a set of perceptions and practices increasingly responsive to his times.

"Part of the Climate" convincingly redefines American modernist poetry in light of developments in modern painting, particularly cubism. The traditional separation of the verbal and visual arts is cast aside here, as Brogan encourages a re-evaluation of 'modernism' itself. Moreover, readers of modern poetry and literature will find this critical work doubly useful, since the author places the poetry of well-known modernists such as Pound, Eliot, and Williams alongside the harder-to-find work of important experimentalists such as Mina Loy, Louis Zukofsky, Gertrude Stein, and George Oppen. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan has assembled this much needed collection of experimental verse from the interwar years by going to the small magazines through which the poems reached their public. She not only shows how significantly many of these American poets of the early twentieth century were influenced by the aesthetic development of cubism in the visual arts but also argues that the cubist aesthetic, at least as it translated into the verbal domain, invariably involved political and ethical issues. The most important of these concerns was to extend the aesthetic revolution of cubism into a genuine 'revolution of the word.' Brogan maintains, in fact, that the multiplicity inherent in cubism anticipates the deconstructive enterprise now seen in criticism itself. With this history of the cubist movement in American verse, she raises serious questions about the politics of canonization and asks us to consider the ethical responsibility of interpretation, both in the creative arts and in critical texts.