Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar. Still Mad: American Women Writers and The Feminist Imagination, 1950-2020

Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2021

Cultural sites of critical insight: philosophy, aesthetics, and African American and Native American women's writings

Reviewed by: Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 Clare Colquitt Shari Benstock . Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. 518 pp. $26.95. Shari Benstock's Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 examines the diverse community of American, British, and French women writers, editors, and publishers who settled in Paris early in this century. Benstock's aim is ambitious: she seeks to enlarge our perception of the modernist movement by directing our attention to the literary women whose contributions to "The Pound Era" have been generally ignored. Her study leads to great rewards. Women of the Left Bank is a tour de force, a beautifully written and elegantly constructed exemplum of revisionist history with which subsequent studies of the period must necessarily engage. Benstock's splendid narrative of the expatriate experience of some twenty-two literary women who converged upon Paris early in this century addresses a central question: "What was it like to be a woman in literary Paris?" Importantly, Benstock's is not an exclusionary history. Pound, Joyce, Hemingway, and Proust among others figure prominently in her lively mapping of the intersections—and the interstices—of these women's lives; yet Benstock's focus is ultimately on the women whose contributions to modernism "have been doubly suppressed by history, either forgotten by the standard literary histories of the time or rendered inconsequential by memoirs and literary biographies." Quite self-consciously, then, Women of the Left Bank acts as a corrective to such works as Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era and Samuel Hynes's The Auden Generation, as well as to more recent feminist studies that reduce the wealth of women's writing to a single story, most notably, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic. Not surprisingly, in constructing her narrative, Benstock takes care to avoid committing what may be termed "the Pound error," for she resists any notion of a monolithic interpretation of modernism or a definitive reading of women's experience. It is thus no accident that the title of her study refers to a community of women or that she addresses herself as much to the differences within this "community" [End Page 761] as to the similarities bonding these women's lives. Rejecting the idea of closure, most particularly in her discussion of the lesbian expatriates who came to Paris, Benstock makes clear her indebtedness to deconstruction, to the practice of "plot[ting] not only the differences between male and female, masculine and feminine, but the differences within each of these categories . . . the differences within gender." Readers wary of the sometimes obfuscating discourse of deconstructive criticism will be relieved by Benstock's elegant and lucid prose. In portraying Edith Wharton's hesitating efforts to gain entry into the conservative Parisian salons, in contrasting Natalie Barney's espousal of an "ethics of promiscuity" with the stuffy formality of her lesbian salon, in recounting the disaster of Colette's marriage and her early persecution as a lesbian artist, in analyzing the heterosexist dynamics of the Stein-Toklas "marriage," in documenting Adrienne Monnier's aghast reaction to Joyce's financial exploitation of her lover Sylvia Beach—Benstock creates a brilliant mosaic of what seems at times a veritable city of literary women. Women of the Left Bank, in short, reads like a novel; as such, it should become a critical best seller. Importantly, this study takes these women seriously as writers, editors, bookstore owners, and publishers. Accordingly, in recounting their lives, Benstock pointedly attends to the extensive contributions this literary community made to the aesthetics and politics of the modernist era. Through her incisive analysis of Gertrude Stein as "a linguistic cross-dresser," of the interrelationship between H. D.'s bisexual ethos and her experimental poetics, of Djuna Barnes's feminist critique of woman's self-alienation, and of Janet Flanner's prescient political commentary in her "Letters from Paris," Benstock unveils a dazzling display of the myriad "modernisms" these women crafted. In attempting to chart so large a literary map, of course, Benstock's treatment of particular writers will occasionally be seen as unfair. Wharton scholars, for instance, will wince at...

Reviewed by: Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings Elizabeth Archuleta Angela L. Cotten and Christa Davis Acampora, eds. Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. 216 pp. Paper, $23.95. Although one does not usually find research on Phillis Wheatley and Paula Gunn Allen in the same book, the essays in Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings contribute to an emerging scholarship that is changing the ways in which we examine cross-cultural relationships between Native Americans and African Americans. Angela L. Cotten's and Christa Davis Acampora's edited collection adds to an already existing conversation by Daniel Littlefield, Tiya Miles, Claudio Saunt, James Brooks, Jonathan Brennan, and Matthew Restall, among others, on the historical and cultural exchanges between Native Americans and African Americans and works that signify on both traditions. Cotten and Acampora refer to a "crossblood literary aesthetics" that has grown out of these shared histories of and contact between African Americans and Native Americans, and they hope their collection encourages comparative approaches that examine overlapping traditions and cultures as well as aesthetic and philosophical innovations. Their collection challenges disciplinary boundaries that discourage comparative investigations of African American and Native American literatures. In addition to the editors' introduction, the volume includes three additional sections entitled "Transformative Aesthetics," "Critical Revisions," and "Re(in)fusing Feminism," suggesting methods for connecting the essays cross-culturally and comparatively. Part 2 uncovers the innovative structures created by Paula Gunn Allen, Phillis Wheatley, and Sherley Anne Williams to [End Page 161] express healing, celebration, and their unique visions and experiences. Part 3 explores how Linda Hogan and Alice Walker revise literary and critical traditions, inscribing themselves into and speaking back to psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist theories. Part 4 examines how the writing of Toni Morrison, Luci Tapahonso, and Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin) questions feminism's narrow focus on gender and sexuality and how their early manifestations excluded race, colonialism, violence, and poverty. The editors note a dearth of scholarship on African American and Native American women's writing in the fields of aesthetics and philosophy, and their goal is to fill this gap by creating models for future comparative analyses. AnaLouise Keating takes a second look at Allen's Grandmothers of the Light, defining it as a different kind of self-help book. To distinguish it from other self-help books, Keating refers to Allen's book as a "womanist self-recovery" book that contains stories of empowerment rather than approaching it as an American Indian text. Elizabeth J. West uncovers in Wheatley's poetry examples of traditional African cosmologies combined with colonial American religious views, which would become the narrative core of contemporary African American women writers. Michael A. Anttonucci finds a blues aesthetic expressed in Williams's poetry, claiming that the blues had more of an aesthetic and cultural impact on American culture than is currently recognized. The essays in part 3 reveal how distinct literary works signify on other texts. Ellen L. Arnold brings Linda Hogan's Solar Storms and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing into dialogue, demonstrating their common goal of cultural recovery and healing gained through ecofeminist insights that claim an alliance between women and nature. In separate essays both Barbara S. Tracy and Angela L. Cotten discuss the ways in which Alice Walker's Meridian signifies on or engages in an African American call-and-response ritual with John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks. By claiming that Walker's novel is a revision of Black Elk Speaks, Tracy points to Meridian as a multivoiced text that refuses to silence the complexities inherent in multiraced identities. Cotten analyzes Meridian through the lens of Karl Marx's historical materialism in order to see how Walker shares some of Marx's perspectives for social change. In comparing their views on social struggle Cotten demonstrates the value of comparative analysis for enriching Marxian and black radical traditions. Part 4's essays focus on women-centered themes and insights in Morrison's Paradise, Tapahonso's "Leda...

Reviewed by: Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women's Writing by Donna M. Campbell Molly J. Freitas Campbell, Donna M.. Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women's Writing. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2016. 400. pp. 64.95 hardcover. Donna M. Campbell's new study challenges the traditional, male-conceived boundaries of American literary naturalism as it catalogues an immense range of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women writers and examines their connections to early film. Bitter Tastes "places women writers at the center rather than at the periphery of American literature of the period" (2) and asks the deceptively simple question, "what is to be gained by this additional classification" (324) of naturalism? Through an extraordinarily wide-ranging study that invokes canonical (e.g, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Gertrude Stein), popular (e.g., Edna Ferber, Ruth Suckow, Fannie Hurst), and sometimes obscure (e.g., Kate Cleary, Dorothy Scarborough, Batterman Lindsay) women authors writing in a diverse variety of forms (novels, short stories, prostitution testimonials, etc.) and connects these women's writings to the early film industry, Campbell "restores a missing context" (325) of naturalism and proves that literary critics indeed have much to gain through such an expanded, interdisciplinary understanding of naturalism's cultural categorization. "Classic" (male) naturalists such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Jack London emphasized the connection between one's innate traits and the environment and thus called into question the concept of free will. Although similarly concerned with deterministic forces encroaching upon women's bodies and experiences, women writers of the same period, Campbell argues, demonstrated a more complicated understanding of the biological and social forces at work in human life than their male counterparts. Reading these authors in the naturalistic vein therefore productively disrupts the category's traditional boundaries and demands renewed conceptual attention from the reader and the critic. Developing a definition that becomes a presiding principle of the text, Campbell terms this expanded classification "unruly naturalism" because it "provides a different way of looking at pervasive strains existing in the background rather than the foreground of classic naturalism, including the issues of waste and abjection, [End Page 280] disability and age, structural unevenness or excess, sentimentalism and melodrama, social reform, and women's use of technology" (4). Each of the book's seven chapters touches upon at least one of these themes and intelligently puts them in conversation with historically specific issues of immigration, urbanization, mechanization, and national identity. Naturalistic women writers examine such issues through the medium of the woman's body, a site of "private surveillance and public spectacle" (9) but also of agency not seen in the works of male writers like Dreiser and Crane. Campbell's inclusive treatment of naturalism is a welcome addition to contemporary studies in the field, including Mary E. Papke's Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism (2003), which considers naturalism in relation to imperialism, sentimentalism, chaos theory, and detective and social justice fiction, and Eric Carl Link's The Vast and Terrible Drama, which argues that the confusion surrounding naturalism's classification stems from its links to multiple fields, including philosophy, science, and literature. More broadly, "placing women's naturalism at the center also responds to the need for a more inclusive canon of American literature" (7), a call echoed by other eminent American literature critics such as Elizabeth Ammons and Wai Chee Dimock. The majority of Bitter Tastes' chapters are lively and persuasive. Chapter three's argument concerning "Bohemian Time," for instance, convincingly studies writers like Willa Cather (in "Coming, Aphrodite!") and Ellen Glasgow (in Phases of an Inferior Planet) to observe the peculiar and difficult position of the woman artist. The woman artist, Campbell shows, can briefly escape the social constraints of bourgeois respectability by entering Bohemian spaces but cannot ever access the "indefinite temporality" (116) of (male) Bohemian time because of biological prescriptions of maternity and childrearing. Although not explicitly said, this chapter is a timely argument for the contemporary struggles of modern women who similarly seek artistic, creative, and sexual freedom but who are rebuffed from full participation in Bohemian life by biological...

Langdon Lynne Faust, ed. American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present. Abridged ed., 2 vols. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983.449 pp., 456 pp. Kristin Herzog. Women, Ethnics, and Exotics: Images of Power in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. 254 pp. Edward Wagenknecht. Daughters of the Covenant: Portraits of Six Jewish Women. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983.192 pp. As a subject of study, women—whether figures of history or of fiction— seem to raise the same issues, even in singularly different works like the three reviewed here: Kristin Herzog's study of nineteenth-century American literature, Women, Ethnics, and Exotics; Edward Wagenknecht's account of six Jewish women, Daughter of the Covenant; and American Women Writers, two volumes that span the centuries since colonial times with their biographic sketches. All draw attention to the issue of women's power. They discern its presence, despite appearances of powerlessness, define the forms of its manifestation, and enumerate its effects. Inseparable from the issue of power are, of course, political issues: indeed, the two may well be synonymous. For the literary critic, politics involve specifically the making or breaking of a literary canon. Herzog seeks to change the traditional canon of nineteenth- century American fiction by making it increasingly "multi-ethnic." She would eliminate major and minor literature as categories by showing that both invest the same power in women, ethnics and natives or "exotics," a power that makes them all generically "feminine." Hawthorne and Melville, no less than Harriet Beecher Stowe, create "feminine" characters who possess "natural" power. In this respect, their work has themes and values in common with those of "neglected" black writers and of Native Americans, whose omission from the canon constitutes a historical mistake that Herzog hopes to rectify.

In this 2010 book, Dorri Beam presents an important contribution to nineteenth-century fiction by examining how and why a florid and sensuous style came to be adopted by so many authors. Discussing a diverse range of authors, including Margaret Fuller and Pauline Hopkins, Beam traces this style through a variety of literary endeavors and reconstructs the political rationale behind the writers' commitments to this form of prose. Beam provides both close readings of a number of familiar and unfamiliar works and an overarching account of the importance of this form of writing, suggesting new ways of looking at style as a medium through which gender can be signified and reshaped. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth Century American Women's Writing redefines our understanding of women's relation to aesthetics and their contribution to both American literary romanticism and feminist reform. This illuminating account provides valuable new insights for scholars of American literature and women's writing.

Book Review| June 01 2010 Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860–1940; Uncommon Women: Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writing Nancy Glazener Nancy Glazener Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2010) 82 (2): 423–425. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2010-008 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nancy Glazener; Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860–1940; Uncommon Women: Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writing. American Literature 1 June 2010; 82 (2): 423–425. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2010-008 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 by Duke University Press2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing David Greven Beam, Dorri . 2010. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press. $89.00 hc. $71.00 e-book. 270 pp. Correction: The print version of this review contained a typographical error in the first sentence. At the request of the publisher, the online article and pdf have been corrected. Dorri Beam's Style, Gender, and Fantasy is a bracing study of écriture feminine in nineteenth-century American writing. What makes Beam's book valuable is her rigorous and passionate exploration of a specifically feminine poetics in the period. Disabusing the reader of any staid notions of what constitutes literary value, Beam makes a persuasive case for a legitimate female literary style that emphasizes what she calls "highly wrought" language and imagery. Often dismissed as flowery and frilly, this style, through Beam's insightful and tough-minded presentation, comes into its own as a highly self-conscious mode of literary art-making and self-expression. Beam's work significantly adds to our understanding of what was at stake for the nineteenth-century woman writer on multiple levels—and not least, her claim to aesthetic legitimacy to begin with. The standards of taste and decorum relegated even popular women writers (and women were by far the more popular writers of the era) to the sidelines. Beam restores the importance of female writing in the century to contemporary literary studies, but crucially he does this by taking women's writing seriously as an aesthetic project. In so doing, she also illuminates what was generally at stake for this century's literature in aesthetic terms. Regarding the latter, Beam's work expands the emergent scholarly interest in literary style in the period. Indeed, many prominent male writers of the period have often been accused of being prolix or florid—Edgar Allan Poe comes to mind. While the entire question of nineteenth-century literary style will now be reexamined in light of Beam's project, her focus will have its most salutary effect in our sustained reappraisal of significant figures such as Margaret Fuller and Harriet Prescott Spofford, among others, artists whose challenging work has often been simultaneously dismissed and misunderstood, especially in aesthetic terms. Writers such as Spofford have been ignored or undervalued until very recently because they offer no "proposal[s] for practical change, . . . no alternative to the cult of feminine beauty" they foreground (134). Yet Beam demonstrates persuasively that Spofford "mines [End Page 165] the possibilities of gorgeous or ornamental style for a woman writer, perversely developing its potential as a feminist aesthetic" (134). Personally, I find Beam's appreciation for Spofford's perversity as bracing as her elucidation of what Spofford—a languorously, sensually weird writer—does with the word. For Beam, nineteenth-century women's writing is characterized by a "stylistic floridity" that invites a "trance-like entrance" into a literary world in which "fruits flush, waters brim and cascade, color pulses, and light saturates"; the "personified elements of nature—sun, rocks, and flowers—take on lives of their own and speak to alternative sensual ways of being in the world that marriage will imperil" (2). Surprisingly, Beam makes no mention of the great French feminist Hélène Cixous's dynamic and controversial theory of l'écriture féminine, literally "women's writing." Regardless of how Beam might view Cixous's work, it would have been interesting and also helpful to see her engage with the theorist's ideas. In any event, Cixous's ideas take on a new force for me if I link them to the historical context Beam provides. "Language that was transparent, that did not grant immediate access to the text or to the author," Beam writes, "was inappropriate for a woman writer"; language that evinced "labor" disrupted limited notions of female propriety. Writing with a flourish, an accentuated personality, further disrupted these standards by flaunting style, a "dubious accessory" (4). The highly, almost disorientingly stylized language and imagery of writers like Spofford—so routinely dismissed or ignored for precisely these reasons—take on a new purposefulness here. What has seemed like...

Reviewed by: Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797-1901 Timothy Morris Harris, Sharon M. , ed. Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797-1901. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1995. xxiii + 200 pp. Cloth: $32.50. Timothy Morris University of Texas—Arlington Copyright © 1995 Northeastern University

Book Review| June 01 2000 The Wilderness Within: American Women Writers and Spiritual Quest; Artist and Attic: A Study of Poetic Space in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing By Kristina K. Groover. Fayetteville: Univ. of Arkansas Press. 1999. vi,134 pp. Cloth, $26.00; paper, $16.00.By Hsin Ying Chi. Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America. 1999. 169 pp. Cloth,$39.00; paper, $24.50. Mary Titus Mary Titus Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2000) 72 (2): 438–439. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-72-2-438 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mary Titus; The Wilderness Within: American Women Writers and Spiritual Quest; Artist and Attic: A Study of Poetic Space in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing. American Literature 1 June 2000; 72 (2): 438–439. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-72-2-438 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. 2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

African-American Literature intersects in its portrayal of the subverted marginal through Literature. It has received universal acknowledgement since the works of both the men and women writers attempt to show the poignant struggles undergone by the African Americans, not for money or power but for asserting or claiming their basic human right of parity and liberty. But men writers have failed to witness the sufferings of women in the enslaved community. Women are given much importance in the literary arena of African- American women as they are the most affected group and the jeopardy of the male dominant society. They are not only the victims of the white dominant society but also of their men. The African- American women writers have highlighted the liberated spirit of black women which will redeem them from their bitter journey of slavery to the victorious state of freedom. One of America’s best women writers who consciously free black women from their state of enslavement in their writings was Toni Morrison. Her Beloved is absolutely a best fiction that has represented the black woman Sethe’s journey from slavery to liberty.

In 1895 Frances Harper begins her poem “The Martyr of Alabama” with the following news item from 1894: “Tim Thompson, a little negro boy, was asked to dance for the amusement of some white toughs. He refused, saying he was a church member. One of the men knocked him down with a club and then danced upon his prostrate form. He then shot the boy in the hip. The boy is dead; his murderer still at large” (Edelstein 9). By beginning a “fictional” poem in this way, Sari Edelstein contends in Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women's Writing, Harper “formally stages the relationship of poetry to the press,” suggesting that poetry must take over the news because the facts (such as they are) do not reveal truth (9). Over the long nineteenth century, Edelstein argues, works of fiction and poetry written by U.S. women authors dialectically engage, rewrite, and remake the various modes of writing employed by the press. In so doing, they offer a dynamic and often critical relationship to the form and content of journalistic media and attempt to intervene in the political consciousness of their era. A tradition of American women's writing therefore can be located between the novel and the news, between journalistic and novelistic modes of writing. Edelstein's book astutely demonstrates that American women writers have always been attuned to the power and practice of journalism and have sought to counterbalance the limits of this form in innovative and socially conscious ways.The book is a concise, exceptionally readable, and eloquently written appraisal, then, of the way two influential modes of discourse shaped each other, and in turn shaped the public's conceptualization of the limits and ethics of journalistic practice. In five chapters, the book evaluates the major journalistic forms of the nineteenth century and examines how women authors both contested and utilized these forms. By focusing on the emergence of a partisan press (chapter one), the penny press (chapter two), the story-papers (chapter three), Civil War newspaper reportage and eyewitness journalism (chapter four), and the links between journalism and realism (chapter five), Edelstein provides both an excellent overview of the rise of different journalistic modes in the nineteenth century and a powerful evaluation of the methods through which women writers engaged these journalistic modes. Explicitly writing against the idea that the novel or fiction was meant to detach readers from the social world, Edelstein instead demonstrates that fictional modes work as an alternative to journalism—an alternative that can be “an educative, socializing medium capable of unifying and enlightening readers” (28). Fiction at times critiques the idea of journalistic truth itself, while at other times it fulfills the promise of an informing, utilitarian, truthful, moral language that journalism fails to provide.The book begins with a chapter focused on Judith Sargent Murray, who was arguably America's first American newspaper woman; this chapter considers the way that fiction acts as a “supervisory discourse” (14) in her writing, one that has the power to remake a partisan press. In a compelling discussion of Murray's novel The Story of Margaretta (1798), Edelstein demonstrates that it “thematizes the danger of an unregulated civic realm in which seduction, plagiarism, and duplicity threaten the family, the integrity of credit, and the credibility of the press” (23). Appropriating and critiquing the conventions of the era's journalism, Murray's novel inaugurates American women's fiction as a “hybrid tradition” always in dialogue with periodical culture. More broadly, at a moment when mainstream journalism was not striving for objectivity, early novels such as this one linked “rhetorical and political education” in order to demonstrate “the potential for fiction to trump the newspaper as viable civic discourse” (36). The chapter could have spent a bit more time in its literary analysis of The Story of Margaretta, but it does cover a great deal of territory and effectively establish the terms of the study.The next chapter examines the emergence of the penny papers in the early 1830s, considered by some to be the first mass media. The penny papers themselves were innovative in that they altered who could read newspapers as well as what a newspaper was; they also claimed to “speak the truth without an agenda” (39) even as they fixated on and gained readership through endless stories about fallen women. In an exceptionally perceptive reading of the penny press and the counter discourse offered by Catherine Williams's Fall River: An Authentic Narrative (1833), Edelstein illustrates that women writers used a sentimental aesthetics as an oppositional discourse, contesting the penny press's claim to “monolithic, empirical truth and offering a competing mode of representation rooted in ethics and social responsibility instead of facts” (39). Williams's novel centers on the true story of a woman (Sarah Maria Cornell) who was seduced and then murdered by the Methodist minister Ephraim Avery; Avery went free after he attacked Cornell's virtue in court and claimed her death was a suicide. Williams's novel therefore concerns not so much “social responsibility” over “facts,” but a fuller version of the facts, one that can create a different kind of emotional truth. The chapter pairs Williams's tale of a sexually fallen woman with that of an economically fallen one, as depicted in Catherine Maria Sedgwick's short story “Fanny McDermot” (1845), in order to demonstrate that while these authors do not eroticize dead women to gain readership (as the penny press did), they nonetheless use figurations of imperiled, exploited women to buttress their own brand of truth and propagate a certain set of middle-class values. Particularly useful is this chapter's discussion of how these two writers attempt to teach readers to respond sympathetically to women like Cornell, and to respond to the news itself in a more empathetic manner.Moving into the 1840s and 1850s, chapter three examines the rise of “story-papers” (six-cent weeklies) alongside an analysis of E. D. E. N. Southworth's phenomenally popular novel The Hidden Hand (1859). The story-papers were a hybrid form that could contain editorials, poetry, domestic advice, humor, and fiction in adjacent columns; as such, they functioned as vehicles to register “the era's anxieties about the breakdown of the nation as well as the gender conventions that female authorship threatened to overturn” (68). Serialized within a story-paper, Edelstein argues that the unconventional gender performance of the heroine in The Hidden Hand is only one manifestation of the novel's portrayal of crisis and formal disorganization; like the story-papers themselves Capitola is a figure for a type of border crossing that can undermine many types of binary distinctions. Edelstein does note that both gendered and national norms are reestablished by text's end, but only with ambivalence; ultimately the novel emphasizes the uncertainty of its historical era and generates a vision of the nation as fractured and disordered.The following chapter shows how women writers in the late 1860s undertook representations of the “eyewitness” accounts of the Civil War. Examining Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches (1869) alongside Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868), Edelstein argues that these narratives invite us to read women's writing as “contributions to the journalistic developments of the era as well as meditations on the representational promises of documentary reportage itself” (90). The era of the Civil War saw a major shift in daily newspapers, as the newspaper became an indispensable vehicle for chronicling events. Moreover, in an era before cameras were in wide usage, the writer's eye was viewed as a sort of living photograph, as the war correspondent became a stand-in for the camera. Edelstein's examination of Hospital Sketches emphasizes Alcott's attention to the ways reportage can compromise the self and even physical body of the correspondent; Alcott ultimately produces an account of the insufficiencies and perils of the journalistic enterprise. Keckley, on the other hand, allows her story to disappear into Mary Todd Lincoln's; in so doing Keckley rejects a scopic regime that sought to make her own body an object and assumes ownership of Lincoln's narrative and body, which she refashions for public consumption. Keckley, like Alcott, foregrounds the perspectival nature of knowledge. Although somewhat lightly researched, overall this chapter was a convincing assessment of how two important women writers co-opted and remade journalistic modes.Chapter five assesses three writers—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far)—in the context of the rise of realistic writing and yellow journalism at the end of the century. At times the research in this chapter lacked depth and the broad focus appeared to impede careful analysis of texts. Edelstein's assessment of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) in terms of Gilman's relationship to journalism also seemed somewhat stretched; the argument might have been more successful if it had discussed “The Yellow Wall-Paper” in light of Gilman's later short story “When I Was a Witch” (1910), which directly critiques newspapers. Edelstein is more successful when she discusses Wells-Barnett's journalistic pamphlets on lynching and their critique of the silence and erasures of contemporary print media on this topic. However, this chapter's discussion of Edith Eaton and the methods through which Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) mimics and critiques the idea of the objective neutrality of the journalistic tradition was more suggestive than truly convincing, and Edelstein might have delved further into secondary criticism of Eaton's writing. Still, the chapter does show how, at a moment in literary history often thought to be defined by the interrelationship between realism and journalism, Gilman, Wells-Barnett, and Eaton “suggest that the relationship between these modes was often oppositional and even hostile” (145).The book does have some weaknesses, then, mainly in terms of the depth of its research. Yet as a whole this is a sophisticated and nuanced study that is convincing about its main point, demonstrating that women writers employed and remade journalistic modes throughout the century. It is also crisp, eloquent, concise, and commandingly written. American women's writing is positioned as a tradition inaugurated and sustained by an investment in the public sphere and its most representative discourse, the press. Edelstein scrutinizes the fructifying interrelationship that exists between the popular press and women's writing, and the ways women writers were “careful and critical readers of the press, attuned to journalism's capacity to shape the ideologies about gender, race, nation, and class that undergird American social and political reality” (154). The book is therefore a very valuable addition to studies of women writers in the nineteenth century. Rather than reading the texts discussed as a private form of discourse, Edelstein shows that women's writing must be viewed as a highly visible, often compensatory mode of public engagement that competes with, but also remakes, the powerful journalistic forces with which it is enmeshed.

Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women's Writing

The present paper aims to examine the dichotomous patterns of the self-perception as presented in the works of Palestinian –American women writers. By presenting the novel West of Jordan ( 2003) written by Laila Halaby, as a representative work of current Palestinian American women literature, I examine the dichotomous patterns of self-perception, and how the writer handles the theme of split identity. After providing a general description of the characteristic features and themes through which different Palestinian American writers articulate the themes of split identity, I will illustrate the novel’s multiplied narrative views, characters, and narrators, focusing on the different Palestinians and Palestinian – Americans perceive irreconcilable Palestinian and American identities and realities .