In Subject to Negotiation, Elaine Neil Orr proposes negotiation as both a state of consciousness and a significant movement for women writers as well as feminist critics. Challenging the "subversive" model of feminist criticism, she argues for the importance of negotiation for feminist practice within a plurality of critical positions and identities. Without claiming the final word -- indeed calling for more words on the subject -- Orr sketches an empirical method for a negotiating feminist criticism and then in successive chapters demonstrates the method at work.

In the author's hybrid theory. "negotiation" constitutes not fractious debates between opposing parties but noisy dialogues between and among subjects whose complex identities overlap a number of opposing positions. Not surprisingly, Orr draws from literary critics writing out of working-class, African-American, Chicana, lesbian, and postcolonial identities, as well as white and academic ones. What is surprising, she claims, is how five representative American women writers -- Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, and Marge Piercy -- demonstrate the very critical and philosophical movements we see in contemporary feminist criticism. Feminist critics, like these writers and their panorama of characters, are necessarily operating between scenes of power, negotiating their interests across uneven fields. As Orr demonstrates, American women writers have produced "negotiating narratives" to accommodate the expectations of their readership while simultaneously contesting the boundaries of female subjectivity.

Subject to Negotiation makes compelling reading for scholars of feminist literary theory, aswell as those interested in twentieth-century American literature, debates over identity politics, and theories of narrative.

The daughter of medical missionaries, Elaine Neil Orr was born in Nigeria in 1954, in the midst of the national movement that would lead to independence from Great Britain. But as she tells it in her captivating new memoir, Orr did not grow up as a stranger abroad; she was a girl at home--only half American, the other half Nigerian. When she was sent alone to the United States for high school, she didn't realize how much leaving Africa would cost her.

It was only in her forties, in the crisis of kidney failure, that she began to recover her African life. In writing "Gods of Noonday" she came to understand her double-rootedness: in the Christian church and the Yoruba shrine, the piano and the talking drum. Memory took her back from Duke Medical Center in North Carolina to the shores of West Africa and her hometown of Ogbomosho in the land of the Yoruba people. Hers was not the dysfunctional American family whose tensions are brought into high relief by the equatorial sun, but a mission girlhood is haunted nonetheless--by spiritual atmospheres and the limits of good intentions.

Orr's father, Lloyd Neil, formerly a high school athlete and World War II pilot, and her mother, Anne, found in Nigeria the adventure that would have escaped them in 1950s America. Elaine identified with her strong, fun-loving father more than her reserved mother, but she herself was as introspective and solitary as her sister Becky was pretty and social. Lloyd acquired a Chevrolet station wagon which carried Elaine and her friends to the Ethiope River, where they swam much as they might have in the United States. But at night the roads were becoming dangerous, and soon the days were clouded by smoke from the coming Biafran War.

Interweaving the lush mission compounds with Nigerian culture, furloughs in the American South with boarding school in Nigeria, and eventually Orr's failing health, the narrative builds in intensity as she recognizes that only through recovering her homeland can she find the strength to survive. Taking its place with classics such as "Out of Africa" and more recent works like "The Poisonwood Bible "and "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Gods of Noonday "is a deeply felt, courageous portrait of a woman's life.

Positive Health is a practical guide for those committed to living with, rather than dying from, HIV, the title has now been rewritten as a holistic approach to wellness, including living with TB, cancer, stress, diabetes, heart disease as well as HIV/AIDS. This is a title for those who wish to take an active role in their own health and provides a whole range of resources to enable people to support their immune systems and stay healthy.

This intense examination of the writings of Tillie Olsen shows Elaine Neil Orr's deeply sympathetic passion for Olsen's literary world. Orr's objective is not simply to offer literary criticism but to interpret the subjects that inspire and disclose Olsen's spiritual vision.

In "Tell me a Riddle," "Yonnondio," and, TIllie Olsen presents a world troubled by the problems of sex, race, and class and inhabited by people who are broken, silenced, defeated. Yet her artistic vision of this tragic world reveals Olsen's resounding affirmation of life. Orr's study shows Olsen's work as a blending of Marxist, feminist, literary, and religious views that give it a unique spiritual perspective. "As the reader progresses through this book," Orr says, "he or she will discover, I believe, that even when Olsen's texts appear to fail, they still evoke our sympathy and compel us to listen." Though the body of Olsen's work is small, its substance is of great significance. Her vision is rooted in her family's Russian Jewish heritage and in her own history as an American worker, a member of the Communist party, a humanist, a feminist, and a mother.

Olsen's portraits of weary workers and mothers, of children, of a dying sailor, and of a black church worker express her enduring hope for transformation and fulfillment and convey the central meaning of her work-the miracle and sanctity of each human life. Thus this first book-length study of Tillie Olsen is a religious interpretation showing a woman-centered world that intertwines the religious and the material and produces Olsen's vision of holiness.

When Emma Davis reads the words of Isaiah 6:8 in her room at a Georgia women's college, she understands her true calling: to become a missionary. It is a leap of faith that sweeps her away to Africa in an odyssey of personal discovery, tremendous hardship, and profound transformation. For the earnest, headstrong daughter of a prosperous slave owner, living among the Yoruba people is utterly unlike Emma's sheltered childhood - as is her new husband, Henry Bowman. 20 years her senior, the mercurial Henry is the object of Emma's mad first love, intensifying the sensations of all they see and share together.