A collection of poetic responses to loss both consolation and inspiration to any reader. Death has always served as one of the most powerful catalysts for poetry. Whether with Dylan Thomas, counseling readers to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light," or with Walt Whitman, taking comfort in the serene arrival "sooner or later" of "delicate death," poets throughout history have faced the mortal losses that all of us inevitably encounter."

The Essential Essays gathers twenty-five of Adrienne Rich’s most renowned essays, demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision. Her thoughts on feminism, poetry, race, homosexuality and identity are still powerful and relevant today. Discussing everything from her fearless poetic vision to her revolutionary views on social justice, Rich’s essays unite the political, personal and poetical. Included are Rich’s landmark essays “Motherhood as Experience and Institution”; “What Is Found There”; “Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts” and “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence”. As Sandra Gilbert writes, “To re-read and to re-think Rich’s prose as a complete oeuvre is to encounter a major public intellectual...”

Now, the much-anticipated Third Edition responds to the wealth of writing by women across the globe with the inclusion of 61 new authors (219 in all) whose diverse works span six centuries. A more flexible two-volume format and a versatile new companion reader make the Third Edition an even better teaching tool. "As diversity itself has shaped the evolution of feminist criticism, from its early preoccupation with women's shared experiences to its more recent absorption in the complex issues and assumptions informing English-language texts by women writers of diverse geographical, cultural, racial, sexual, religious, and class origins and influences, so diversity has shaped the revisions of this anthology." From the Preface"

Forty years after their first ground breaking work of feminist literary theory, The Madwoman in the Attic, award-winning collaborators Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar map the literary history of feminism's second wave. From its stirrings in the midcentury-when Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan and Joan Didion found their voices and Diane di Prima, Lorraine Hansberry and Audre Lorde discovered community in rebellion-to a resurgence in the new millennium in the writings of Alison Bechdel, Claudia Rankine and N. K. Jemisin, Gilbert and Gubar trace the evolution of feminist literature. They offer lucid, compassionate and piercing readings of major works by these writers and others, including Adrienne Rich, Ursula K. Le Guin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Susan Sontag, Gloria Anzaldua and Toni Morrison. Activists and theorists like Nina Simone, Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler also populate these pages as Gilbert and Gubar examine the overlapping terrain of literature and politics in a comprehensive portrait of an expanding movement. As Gilbert and Gubar chart feminist gains-including creative new forms of protests and changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality-they show how the legacies of second wave feminists and the misogynistic culture they fought, extend to the present. In doing so, they celebrate the diversity and urgency of women who have turned passionate rage into powerful writing.

Forty years after their first groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, The Madwoman in the Attic, award-winning collaborators Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar map the literary history of feminism's second wave. In Still Mad, they offer lively readings of major works by such writers as Sylvia Plath, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Rich, Ursula K. Le Guin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gloria Anzaldua and Toni Morrison. To address shifting social attitudes over seven decades, they discuss polemics by thinkers from Kate Millett and Susan Sontag to Audre Lorde, Andrea Dworkin and Judith Butler. As Gilbert and Gubar chart feminist gains-including creative new forms of protests and changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality-they show how the legacies of second wave feminists, and the misogynistic culture they fought, extend to the present. In doing so, they celebrate the diversity and urgency of women who have turned passionate rage into powerful writing.

"A feminist classic."-Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review "A pivotal book, one of those after which we will never think the same again."-Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Washington Post Book World A pathbreaking book of literary criticism is now reissued with a new introduction by Lisa Appignanesi that speaks to how The Madwoman in the Attic set the groundwork for subsequent generations of scholars writing about women writers, and why the book still feels fresh some four decades later.

Cultural Writing. Introduction by Lawrence DiStasi. 1942, the first full year of World War II for the United States, was a time of fear and uncertainty for Americans of Italian descent. Wartime regulations required that 600,000 Italian "resident aliens" carry photo-identity cards, restricted their freedom of movement, and forced an estimated 10,000 along the West Coast to relocate. Local police searched homes for guns, cameras, and shortwave radios. Within six months after war was declared, 1,500 Italian resident aliens were arrested for curfew, travel, and contraband violations, and some 250 were imprisoned in military camps for up to two years. Even some naturalized citizens had to leave their homes and businesses because the military decided that they were too dangerous to remain in strategic areas. All but forgotten in the post-war years, obscured by the story of the Japanese-American internment, officially denied, and simply repressed as a disturbing and shameful memory, this secret stor

Eating Words gathers food writing of literary distinction and historical sweep into one splendid volume. Beginning with the taboos of the Old Testament and the tastes of ancient Rome, and including travel essays, polemics, memoirs and poems, the book is divided into sections such as "Kitchen Practices"; "Food Memory: Identity, Family, Ethnicity"; "Eating: Delight, Disgust, Hunger, Horror" and "Food Politics". Selections by Julia Child, Anthony Bourdain, Bill Buford, Michael Pollan, Molly O'Neill, Calvin Trillin and Adam Gopnik, along with authors not usually associated with gastronomy-Maxine Hong Kingston, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Hemingway, Chekhov and David Foster Wallace-enliven and enrich this comprehensive anthology.

The title of this collection at times mournful, sardonic, and joyous refers to the grief in the wake of loss. Yet these poems aren't just about the consequences of loss but also about the complex experiences of endurance, acquiescence, and rebirth that, with luck, mark the aftermath of sorrow. from "Aftermath: Kite" But the thought is only paper after all, a soul that clings to a stick, tears open, shreds as if it's flung to the ground in a final shiny fall, and at last the line goes limp, the climbing ends. Beyond the rush & sweep, an arc of silence though a mind imagined this flight, & proved it once."

Prominent critic, poet, and memoirist Sandra M. Gilbert explores our relationship to death though literature, history, poetry, and societal practices. Does death change--and if it does, how has it changed in the last century? And how have our experiences and expressions of grief changed? Did the traumas of Hiroshima and the Holocaust transform our thinking about mortality? More recently, did the catastrophe of 9/11 alter our modes of mourning? And are there at the same time aspects of grief that barely change from age to age? Seneca wrote, "Anyone can stop a man's life but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it." This inevitability has left varying marks on all human cultures. Exploring expressions of faith, burial customs, photographs, poems, and memoirs, acclaimed author Sandra M. Gilbert brings to the topic of death the critical skill that won her fame for The Madwoman in the Attic and other books, as she examines both the changelessness of grief and the changing customs that mark contemporary mourning.

An ambitious, intricately wrought corona of sonnets ponders the nature of belonging in every sense of the word.
Belongings as possessions, as the history and furnishings of a life, and as the places in which life itself happens are the preoccupations at the heart of this affecting collection. Moving from memories of a childhood apartment to mourning for the poet's mother, Belongings explores the question: "Where, how, and to what do you belong?

This stunning new collection, winner of the American Book Award, documents some thirty years of Sandra Gilbert's career as a poet, from her sometimes fearful, sometimes exuberant early visions, through her feminist awakenings and the explorations of memory and desire, to a range of recent poems mapping the many meanings of grief, survival, and even regeneration.

A revisionist study that rejects the time-honored argument that the Great War was the cataclysmic break with the epoch that preceded it Download Plain Text version Although many novels and works of history have been published on the calamity that was the First World War, no work until this one has sought to unify current historical and literary interpretations of the 1914-1918 era and its implications for modern life. The essays collected here chart the war and its cultural and literary contours from a variety of new and challenging intellectual vantage points. Focusing in different essays on America, France, Britain, and Germany, the contributors to this book contest the long-accepted argument about World War I as the crucible of modern life. Instead, their interrogations of the trench experience, home-front conditions, forms of mass culture, and literary genres reveal that the war was as much a moment of cultural opportunity as it was the point of origin for modern society or its cultural forms. Showing how prudery and decency became patriotic imperatives after 1914, for example, they explore how the wartime experience allowed for a cultural ""crackdown"" on decadence and sexuality that had been a conservative cry long before the war but became a matter of state policy only with the start of hostilities. In similarly revisionist interpretations of politics, literature, morality, and post-war efforts to memorialize the wartime experience, the contributors collapse the long-held notion of the war as a cataclysmic break with the epoch that preceded it. What they show instead is that the mass culture of the pre-war era produced and defined the war, just as the warring states used the forces of mass culture to keep the fighting going, to sustain society behind the lines, and ultimately to construct meaning and historical memory out of a thing we still call the ""Great War."" Douglas Mackaman, the author of Leisure Settings: Bourgeois Culture, Medicine and the Spa in Modern France, is an associate professor of history and the director of French area studies at the University of Southern Mississippi. Michael Mays is an associate professor of English and the co-founder and co-director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Life at the University of Southern Mississippi.

"Widow's Walk," the book's centerpiece, charts the poet's journey through the stages of grief, from bleak moments of desolation to tenuous instants of acceptance. Gilbert seeks both to elegize her husband and to understand his death in public, political, and philosophical contexts. Ghost Volcano is a tender, courageous, loving, and ultimately universal account of how we endure grief.

A Memoir

"A wrenching tale of medical mistakes, death, shock, grief, and frustration, told with love and anger."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"An enduring contribution to the literature of grief."--New York Times Book Review

Sandra Gilbert's husband, Elliot, underwent surgery for prostate cancer at a major medical center, and then inexplicably died hours later in the recovery room. To this day, no one from the hospital has told his family how or why he died.

"The memoir recounts the events preceding Elliot's death and leading up to and beyond the legal resolution. But its power lies in the writers anger and her grief, and in her all-consuming determination: her book is a moving and extended meditation on moral obsession."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Detail by detail, like a good murder mystery, Wrongful Death gains momentum steadily and barrels to a satisfying conclusion."--Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Wrongful Death is, most of all, an unwavering, impassioned inquest as Gilbert attempts to determine the immediate cause of her husbands medical termination. "--Los Angeles Times

Sandra Gilbert is a poet and critic and co-editor with Susan Gubar of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. She is professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

How do writers and their readers imagine the future in a turbulent time of sex war and sex change? And how have transformations of gender and genre affected literary representations of "woman," "man," "family," and "society"? This final volume in Gilbert and Gubar's landmark three-part No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century argues that throughout the twentieth century women of letters have found themselves on a confusing cultural front and that most, increasingly aware of the artifice of gender, have dispatched missives recording some form of the "future shock" associated with profound changes in the roles and rules governing sexuality. Divided into two parts, Letters from the Front is chronological in organization, with the first section focusing on such writers of the modernist period as Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and H.D., and the second devoted to authors who came to prominence after the Second World War, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and A.S. Byatt. Embroiled in the sex antagonism that Gilbert and Gubar traced in The War of the Words and in the sexual experimentations that they studied in Sexchanges, all these artists struggled to envision the inscription of hitherto untold stories on what H.D. called "the blank pages/of the unwritten volume of the new." Through the works of the first group, Gilbert and Gubar focus in particular on the demise of any single normative definition of the feminine and the rise of masquerades of "femininity" amounting to "female female impersonation." In the writings of the second group, the critics pay special attention to proliferating revisions of the family romance-revisions significantly inflected by differences in race, class, and ethnicity-and to the rise of masquerades of masculinity, or "male male impersonation." Throughout, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the impact on literature of such crucial historical events as the Harlem Renaissance, the Second World War, and the "sexual revolution" of the sixties. What kind of future might such a past engender? Their book concludes with a fantasia on "The Further Adventures of Snow White" in which their bravura retellings of the Grimm fairy tale illustrate ways in which future writing about gender might develop.

What might sex be, and what could sex roles be, in the midst of a war between men and women? What is a "woman," a "man," an "androgyne"? Such questions haunt the works Gilbert and Gubar study in Sexchanges, the second volume of their landmark trilogy No Man's Land. Investigating the connections between the feminine and the modern made by writers from Rider Haggard, Olive Schreiner, and Kate Chopin to Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Caryl Churchill, they show that the "no man's land" of the Great War became a metaphor for a crisis of masculinity-a crisis that was already associated with the decline of imperialism and the rise of the femme fatale at the fin de siecle, with the newly visible lesbian literary community that was formed in those years and with what many thinkers increasingly understood to be the artifice of gender. Throughout this century, the therefore argue, images of sexchanges-explored in fictions about transvestism and transsexualism-constituted a set of striking tropes through which male and female writers sought to combat one another's conceptions of the relation between anatomy and destiny.

"The range of this new collection is exciting. Gilbert travels along the shifting boundaries of past and present with wonderful deftness, making Jackson Heights into a magic kingdom. I love this rich ethnic mix."--Maxine Kumin

The first book in a landmark three-volume work that brings feminist theory to bear on modern literature in English. Focusing on both male and female writers, Gilbert and Gubar here survey social, literary, and linguistic conflicts between the sexes as revealed in texts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers from Tennyson to Woolf, from Hemingway to Plath. "An exciting and ground-breaking work."-Carolyn Heilbrun, Columbia University "Fast, funny, profound in its theoretical assertions, and deliciously irreverent in its asides. Male readers and critics will ignore it at their own peril."-Joyce Carol Oates "Should be welcomed both by contemporary women readers and by anyone who has had the experience of modernism but wondered about its meanings."-Christine Froula, New York Times Book Review "No Man's Land will surely rewrite the history of modernism."-Maureen Corrigan, Village Voice "No Man's Land promises to be as crucial for our understanding of 20th-century literature as The Madwoman in the Attic has been for our understanding of 19th-century literature."-Clare Hanson, Times Higher Education Supplement

What is the daily bread of women? In these splendid poems, Sandra Gilbert imagines spiritual regeneration through the tradition pioneered by the two Emilys--Emily Dickinson and Emily Bronte--who are her emblematic foremothers. At the same time, she sees the perils as well as the possibilities of change. The "loved walls" might fall, some "animal goddess in her skull" might destroy what is cherished along with what is oppressive. Tracing the anxieties of history, this book captures the female "daguerreotypes" that persist today and the "still lives" of many women. In so doing, the poet has created a wide variety of voices, including confessional accounts of her own experiences and visionary encounters: little vials of mother's blood in a bureau, a refrigerator that hums blessings like a "complicitous mother," a dressmaker's dummy sailing forward into a mirror--images that invoke vivid, revealing meditations on myth and domesticity. Yet these poems also celebrate the joys that should endure: love and friendship, "haloes of desire," a piece of Emily Dickinson's black cake. Of this book, Frank Bidart has said, "These are poems of self-definition that heal rather than exacerbate the dramas of gender none of us can escape. They reflect Sandra Gilbert's characteristic subtlety, freshness of invention and insight, generosity of spirit. I enthusiastically recommend this book."

..". the best collection of feminist essays on women poets now available." Spokeswoman Review

" The essays] form a satisfying whole, stunningly enlightening, important for literature and women s studies.... " Library Journal

The essays in this landmark volume highlight the achievements of "Shakespeare s sisters," including Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and others."