Joanna Russ

Abstract

Joanna Russ (1937-2011) was an outstanding writer, critic, and theorist of science fiction at a time when female writers were marginal to the genre, and very few women, perhaps only Judith Merril and Joanna herself, had significant influence on the field. In her university teaching and in her writing she championed the integration of new social models and higher literary standards into genre works. In her review columns for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction she dissected the masters of the New Wave with appreciation, wit, and incisive intelligence. Her experimental novel The Female Man (1975) is an essential seventies Feminist text, still relevant today; her groundbreaking academic articles are recognized as foundation studies in feminist and science fiction literary scholarship. Drawing on Jeanne Cortiel’s lesbian feminist appraisal of Russ, Demand My Writing (1999), Farah Mendelsohn’s essay collection On Joanna Russ (2009), and a wide range of contemporary sources, this book aims to give context to her career in the America of her times, from the Cold War domestic revival through the 1960s decade of protest and the Second Wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, into the twenty-first century, examining her novels, her remarkable short fiction, her critical and autobiographical works, her role in the science fiction community, and her contributions to feminist debate.