This is the first book-length study to read women of the Beat Generation as feminist writers. The book focuses on one author from each of the three generations that comprise the groups of female writers associated with the Beats – Diane di Prima, ruth weiss and Anne Waldman – as well as on experimental and multimedia artists, such as Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker, who have not been read through the prism of Beat feminism before. This book argues that these writers’ feminism evolved over time but persistently focussed on intertextuality, transformation, revisionism, gender, interventionist poetics and activism. It demonstrates how these Beat feminisms counteract the ways in which women have been undermined, possessed or silenced.

Examining a peculiarity in the legacy of the Beat Generation, this book considers the fact that a body of literature centered around the work of authors with misogynist tendencies such as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac has been a profound influence on later generations of female writers and artists who work through the prism of feminism. The study aims to show that the idea that the Beat Generation was a "boy gang" is a misconception forged by Ginsberg and others in the group, who not only marginalized female authors in their midst but also construed women as symbols of stagnation and domesticity. As early as the 1960s, female Beat writers attempted to express themselves not through the narratives of Beat sexual and social rebellions, but through feminist discourses which sought to free the woman from the patriarchal ideal of either mother or waiting maiden. MacKay argues that Beat women of later generations expand writing techniques they self-consciously inherit from male Beat writers, such as long breath lines in poetry and the cut-up technique. While Ginsberg and Burroughs utilize these to show the potentiality of the free mind, which has no social, sexual, or geographical limits, female authors apply them to interrogate gender as a fixed category. This study demonstrates that female authors who pay homage to male Beat writers often rearticulate and critique masculinist discourse while maintaining the spirit of defiance and resistance.

Diane Glancy is one of the outstanding Native American authors of modern times. Working in multiple genres - poetry, novel, theatre and nonfiction - she has created a vast, ceaselessly provocative oeuvre (more than 35 volumes) and an instantly recognizable voice. Her subject matter is astonishingly diverse, encompassing everything from the Cherokee Trail of Tears to the New Testament character of Dorcas, from the lives of small-town Midwestern women to the joys of classic automobiles, from grade school maskmaking to the recuperation of personal heritage in the archives.The essays in this groundbreaking volume represent the first attempt to systematically survey this challenging writer. Ten outstanding scholars approach her work, mapping out controversies and providing readers of Glancy with various contexts and comparisons through which to understand her ideas. These chapters take a variety of ideological and methodological positions (feminist, Christian, postcolonial, literary-nationalist and more), the better to draw out the complexities of a writer whose work never lets the reader come to easy conclusions. Also included are an original interview with Glancy herself, a survey of previous criticism and a bibliography of her writings. This volume will therefore serve equally well as an introduction to Glancy for newcomers and as an in-depth survey for people already familiar with her work.The Salt Companion to Diane Glancy is part of a unique series of companion volumes to Native American poets. Previous subjects include Carter Revard and Jim Barnes.

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) was one of the central figures in literary modernism in the 1910s. She collaborated with Ezra Pound and others and played an important role in the early development of modernist poetry. This Cambridge Companion is a critical introduction to H. D. containing essays on all her major works. The first part explores the author's initial exclusion from the canon and her subsequent reinstatement; her tendency to merge fact with fiction in her autobiographical texts; her contribution to the little magazines; her relation to modernism; her representation of gender; and her influence on later generations of writers. The second part offers close and accessible critical analyses of H. D.'s style, her poems Hymen and Trilogy, her novels HERmione and Majic Ring, her understanding of translation as literary practice and of her notion of history in Tribute to Freud and The Gift.

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) was one of the central figures in literary modernism in the 1910s. She collaborated with Ezra Pound and others and played an important role in the early development of modernist poetry. This Cambridge Companion is a critical introduction to H. D. containing essays on all her major works. The first part explores the author's initial exclusion from the canon and her subsequent reinstatement; her tendency to merge fact with fiction in her autobiographical texts; her contribution to the little magazines; her relation to modernism; her representation of gender; and her influence on later generations of writers. The second part offers close and accessible critical analyses of H. D.'s style, her poems Hymen and Trilogy, her novels HERmione and Majic Ring, her understanding of translation as literary practice and of her notion of history in Tribute to Freud and The Gift.