American Women Writers Research Articles

Lost Ladies: (Dis)locating Willa Cather as Feminist Recovery Work

Lost Ladies:(Dis)locating Willa Cather as Feminist Recovery Work Anna Creadick Peacocks are inspiring . . . but they sure don't stop to consider they might be standing in your way. —Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983, p. 59) For so long, and justifiably, the project of Legacy in general and the Profiles feature in particular has been a commitment to bringing women writers in. As we teach and write about women writers today, are there some who ought to be left out? Are there some women writers who, like Flannery O'Connor, to whom Walker is referring in the epigraph above, might even be "standing in [the] way"? In this essay I take up the case of Willa Cather in service of what might seem a counterintuitive question: Could the sidelining of some women writers ever be part of feminist recovery work? Where and why must we include or exclude a writer like Cather? And why, or at what cost, has she received what could be seen as an excess of scholarly attention? leaving cather out I recently decided to resuscitate an American women writers course long on the books at the small liberal arts college where I teach. After some agonizing about the book list, I decided to leave Cather out. That difficult choice led me to this essay.1 Cather's centrality to the American literary canon is as unquestionable as her critical status is formidable. Over twenty years ago, Phyllis Frus and Stanley Corkin charted a "climactic phase" of Cather scholarship, noting with satisfaction that "[a]t last count there were 860 online citations for [Cather] in the [End Page 102] MLA bibliography" (206). In the two decades since, that number has nearly tripled. The MLA International Bibliography currently lists more scholarship on Cather than on Edith Wharton or Kate Chopin, more than on Alice Walker or Zora Neale Hurston, more than on Tillie Olsen or Flannery O'Connor. Today, Cather trails only Emily Dickinson and Toni Morrison as the most-studied American woman author.2 One explanation for the endless fascination with Cather as a subject comes from Deborah Carlin, who notes, "Whether viewed as an American icon, a woman writer, a lesbian, a cosmopolitan Midwesterner, a conservative Republican, a scathing journalist, an antimodernist, or an embittered elegiast, Cather remains an anomaly in American literature and her fiction is peculiarly hard to place" (6).3 These same qualities that make Cather so hard for scholars to "place" also make her so easy to place in the classroom. I could, and do, teach Cather in my Modern American Literature class and in my Sexuality and American Literature class. But in my American Women Writers course, I balked. Why? To manage the enormity of the course subject, I chose an organizing theme: "Feminist Recovery Work." We would read the women writers we might never have read at all if not for the labor of feminist critics who rescued those writers from obscurity, or at least from the margins. So I assigned Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anzia Yezierska. We read Gloria Anzaldúa, Mitsuye Yamada, and Grace Metalious. The course opened with Harriet Jacobs's 1861 slave narrative and closed with Janet Mock's 2014 memoir of trans womanhood, which enacts a different kind of recovery work while also regularly name-checking many authors already on the syllabus. But I kept Cather out. That decision had to do with three forces often at play in American women's writing: misogyny, canonicity, and feminism. misogynist (mis)readings Flashback, 2005: I was a new visiting assistant professor, teaching an American literature survey, when one especially enthusiastic student asked if he could come to office hours "just to talk more about the reading." I remember so clearly how he knocked on the doorjamb, stepped in, sat down in the late autumn light, looked up at me, and said, "I usually hate female writers—but I really love this book." After working to control my shock, I smiled weakly, took a breath, and in my mind began to compose a Cather paper. The book? Cather's 1923 novel A Lost Lady. A Lost Lady offers excellent terrain for...

Redwood: A Tale by Catharine Maria Sedgwick

Reviewed by: Redwood: A Tale by Catharine Maria Sedgwick Rachel B. Griffis Redwood: A Tale. By Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Edited by Jenifer B. Elmore. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. vii + 320 pp. $120 hardback/$120 e-book. Originally published in 1824, Redwood: A Tale is the last of Catharine Maria Sedgwick's major novels to be reprinted in a modern scholarly edition. Since Mary Kelley edited Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827) for publication by Rutgers University Press in 1987, new editions of Sedgwick's novels have been released steadily, with the most recent being Married or Single? (1857), edited by Deborah Gussman and published by University of Nebraska Press in 2015. Jenifer B. Elmore's new edition of Redwood is therefore a milestone for scholars of Sedgwick and nineteenth-century American women writers, who now have all six of Sedgwick's major novels available in a format conducive to teaching and research. Redwood follows the orphan Ellen Bruce as she grapples with her identity, navigates both sincere and disingenuous friendships, meets and falls in love with Charles Westall, helps save her friend Emily Allen from the Shakers, and eventually discovers the mystery of her parentage. The titular character, Henry Redwood, is Ellen's long-lost father, a Virginia planter who abandoned his first wife, Ellen's mother, a virtuous woman who died shortly after giving birth. Henry does not learn that he fathered a child with his first wife until the end of the novel, after he has become acquainted with Ellen and developed a parental fondness for her. Both Henry and Ellen are delighted to learn that they are father and daughter, and Ellen facilitates Henry's repentance and religious conversion before he dies. Though Sedgwick does not specify the date of the novel's events, Elmore speculates that Redwood's historical setting could be as early as the years following the American Revolution or as late as the 1820s. Most of the events of the novel take place in Vermont and Massachusetts, though characters travel from Virginia, South Carolina, Boston, Philadelphia, and England. Through the [End Page 115] geographical diversity of her characters, Sedgwick explores regional differences and tensions, particularly between the North and South and between England and the United States. Redwood is a work of sentimentalism deeply engaged with political, social, moral, and religious questions, especially as these topics pertain to the lives of American women. Sedgwick challenges the institution of slavery through her portrayal of Lilly, an enslaved woman who works as a maid for Ellen's manipulative half sister Caroline. Lilly self-liberates and elopes with a West Indian man when the Redwood family visits New York, a plot twist that highlights political tensions between North and South. The subplot featuring Ellen's rescue of her friend Emily from the exploitative Shaker leader Reuben Harrington invites readers' reflection on the meaning of freedom and how harmful ideologies limit and confine individuals and communities in multiple aspects of life—morally, intellectually, and physically. Sedgwick also complicates the ideal of feminine domestic fulfillment through Ellen's mentor Debby Lenox, who defies conventional performances of gender and affirms the benefits of singlehood amid a flurry of marriages at the novel's conclusion. Elmore's edition of Redwood contains a substantive introduction, a bibliography of recent scholarly work on Sedgwick, a chronology of Sedgwick's life and literary output, a character list, appendices, and the prefaces Sedgwick wrote for the book in 1824 and 1850. This scholarly edition of Redwood reproduces the original 1824 version, while incorporating the changes in spellings and punctuation Sedgwick made for the 1850 edition. The 1824 preface, located at the beginning of the book, contains Sedgwick's reflections on the role of the novel in her time and her own aspirations for Redwood, which she hopes will convey "the great truths of our common religion" (7). In the 1850 preface (Appendix A), Sedgwick expresses remorse for offending the Shakers through her negative portrayal of them, and in the 1850 edition she significantly revised many of her descriptions of this religious community, which, Elmore asserts, "soften[s] her criticism of the doctrines and practices of the Shakers" (317). In Appendix...

Reading Black Female Voices in Spain: Towards a translation history of African American women’s literature

This paper presents a descriptive approach to the reception of African American women’s literature in Spain through the study of its translation history. In this context, the first part of the paper describes the endeavor of developing AfroBib, a bibliographical tool that compiles exhaustive data about translations of African American women authors published in Spain. The second part of the paper discusses the translation history of African American women’s literature in the target country based on the statistical analysis of the data provided by our main research tool. The results display clear evidence of the increase in the circulation of African American women’s works and illustrate a complex network of social and literary factors that have influenced choices and strategies governing the translation of African American women writers in the country. This study offers unprecedented data, thereby holding out the prospect of encouraging parallel research lines.

Templates for Authorship: American Women’s Literary Autobiography of the 1930s

Templates for Authorship: American Women’s Literary Autobiography of the 1930s

Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form

Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form

Representation of Marginalization in the Life Writing of African American Women Writers

The process of imperialism and colonialism was established on the covert idea of economic and political exploitation of the underdeveloped eastern cultures by the dominant west. With the process of decolonization, the marginalized and the poor have been given a centre space alongwith the reversal of the order where those who were the object for centuries, suddenly refuse to be subjected to misrepresentation and domination, and begin to constitute their own discourses. Literature serves as a medium of honest self expression and platform to express the true self for women. American society has triply disempowered and disenfranchised African American women on the basis of race, gender and class. Many African American women writers attempt to break down traditional structures and dislocate narrative strategies in order to re-examine subject identity and to demonstrate the complexity of female experience. By writing about their lives the marginalized are valorized and their oppression turns into empowerment. Life writing helps females to explore subjectivity and to assume authorship of their own life. The account of the life of African American women writers chronicles their frequent encounters with racism, sexism and classism as they describe the people, events and personal qualities that helped them to survive the devastating effects of their environment.

Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels by Dale M. Bauer

Reviewed by: Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels by Dale M. Bauer Rachel Ihara BAUER, DALE M. Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 172 pp. $99.99 hardcover; $80.00 e-book. An ambitious study of four popular American women writers, Dale M. Bauer's Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels proceeds from the premise that understanding a serial author requires reading beyond a few texts in order to grasp "the entirety of an author's production" (2). This is no small task given the prodigious output of the authors under consideration: E.D.E.N. Southworth (approximately fiftytwo novels), Ann Stephens (twenty-six), Laura Jean Libbey (possibly seventy novels), and Mary Jane Holmes (thirty-nine). Such numbers boggle the mind, and the time and devotion involved in tackling all of these novels, with their convoluted plots and beset heroines, is impressive indeed. The study that results aims to make sense of this abundance of plots, in order to chart the particular themes and preoccupations of each author while also making an argument for their shared interest in narratives of female suffering (as a result of sham marriages, bad men, mistaken identities, and bouts of insanity), suffering that is provisionally resolved in abrupt conclusions (through sound marriages, restored senses, and transformed identities), before being taken up again in the next serial. Building on, yet diverging from, early studies of popular women's fiction, like Helen Papashvily's All the Happy Endings (1956), which dismissed serial plots as "simple" (xiv), and Nina Baym's Woman's Fiction (1978), which saw in these novels "'a single tale' with 'one overplot'" (xv), Bauer seeks to do justice to the rich and varied issues taken up by these authors. For instance, while critical attention to Southworth's best-known novel, The Hidden Hand (1859), might lead to an assumption that cross-dressing represents her primary challenge [End Page 308] to gender norms, Bauer sees mental breakdowns in Southworth's characters as more typical of Southworth's strategy for highlighting and confronting various societal ills. One challenge in adopting this all-encompassing approach is that it requires a command of a substantial number of novels, most of which will be unfamiliar to all but a few scholars of American literature. This means that Bauer's claims about texts and their significance rest, to a large degree, upon plot summaries. While these glosses are intended to illuminate the points being advanced, often they seem to exceed the critical purpose accorded to them, pointing to alternative interpretations and avenues of exploration. For example, Bauer frames a discussion of Southworth's novel The Fortune Seeker, or The Bridal Day (1866) as an instance of Southworth's return to the idea that "moral equilibrium between the sexes ends monomanias of all sorts, which caused the cultural and personal irresponsibility that she wanted her novels to redress" (22–23). Yet what follows, ostensibly to illustrate this point, is a summary of the adventures of the novel's heroine, Astrea, who is captured on her wedding night, is disguised as a "quadroon" and sold, is compelled to rebuff the sexual advances of her purchaser, and temporarily loses her reason, before regaining her senses when she is reunited with her husband. This plot outline, while it provides evidence of repeated themes in Southworth's oeuvre (villains preying on young women, racial disguise, mistaken identities, brain inflammation, and spouses separated and reunited), does not clearly support a reading of Southworth's fiction as primarily concerned with women's suffering and temporary insanity as social critique. This may be an issue of method as much as material. The sheer abundance of "data," along with the need to convey to the reader, in broad strokes, the outlines of the many novels under discussion, constantly threatens to overwhelm any unifying argument that seeks to bring these texts together. Bauer's aim, to do justice to the messiness and variability that characterizes these novels, individually and as a whole, is to be commended. However, in reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels, I couldn't help but wonder if there might be another way to capture the...

The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature by Lydia G. Fash

Reviewed by: The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature by Lydia G. Fash Desirée Henderson The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature. By Lydia G. Fash. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. x + 316 pp. $65.00 cloth/$37.50 paper/$37.50 e-book. Lydia G. Fash’s The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature is defined by substantial claims about three main topics, two of which are highlighted in the book’s title. First, Fash presents an argument about genre, challenging the predominance of the novel in nineteenth-century America and instead proposing that two short prose forms, the tale and the sketch, deserve recognition for their foundational role in literary history. Fash states that the tale and the sketch have their own defining genre characteristics that should not be subsumed under the umbrella category of the short story, because doing so obscures the particular contribution that tales and sketches have made to American literary nationalism. In addition, Fash brings a critical eye to the generic containers through which these short texts were published, circulated, and collected (the miscellany, the periodical, the literary annual or gift book) or into which they were incorporated as supporting structures (the novel). Second, her book follows the temporal turn in literary studies by examining how the tale and the sketch were employed to represent a specific moment in time: the origins of the American nation. Her focus on what she terms “the culture of beginnings” enables Fash to track how the unique temporal orientations of the tale and the sketch made them ideal vehicles for authors concerned with [End Page 165] imagining national origins, sometimes as grandiose myths but more often as complicated timescapes that put different experiences and identities in conflict (8). Third, Fash explores how tales and sketches recounting America’s beginnings contributed to a national narrative of “white fictive ethnicity” (142). Although, according to Fash, stories about American history could be adapted to accommodate women’s voices and thereby critique the phallocentrism of national origin stories, such flexibility did not extend to race or ethnicity. For the most part, nineteenth-century tales and sketches promoted a vision of America as ideally white, employing Native Americans as mere props and eliding the role of slavery and white supremacy in nation formation and expansion. If a critique can be offered of Fash’s book, it would be that these three large and worthy arguments jostle for attention. At times, certain topics rise in prominence while the others recede into the background. For example, sometimes when discussing the representation of time within certain texts, the question of whether those texts are tales or sketches drops out. Of the three topics, it is the last—the role of race and, specifically, whiteness—that most consistently disappears from view. When it surfaces, it brings valuable dimensions to Fash’s analysis, but it does not always stay in focus. Fash’s book addresses a range of literary figures, some long associated with tales and sketches (Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe) and others whose relationship to short prose might not be as well known (Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown). It is in her chapters on Sarah Josepha Hale and Catharine Maria Sedgwick that Fash most clearly indicates what a focus on the tale and sketch has to contribute to the study of American women writers. That Hale and Sedgwick—and most other women writers of the nineteenth century—were prolific authors of short fiction and narrative is a recognized fact, but one frequently passed over in accounts of their literary careers in favor of other achievements (most commonly, the publication of novels). Fash is correct that centering tales, sketches, and other short forms has the potential to render a more accurate understanding of how the conventions and demands of nineteenth-century publishing shaped how—and in what form—women writers could express their relationship to the nation-state. Hale offers an interesting case study because she was the author of numerous sketches and, as editor of Ladies’ Magazine (the focus of Fash’s analysis) and later Godey’s Lady’s Book, was also...

Science Fictionality and Post-65 Asian American Literature

AbstractSince 1965, Asian American authors have been key mediators of science fictionality, defined as a postwar fantasy that associates endless, industrial-led economic expansion with racialized groups of upwardly mobile professionals. This status is a consequence of the occupational concentration of Asian immigrants into professional-managerial careers, especially in scientific and technical fields: a phenomenon that can be traced back to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976) along with the debut works of recent Chinese American women writers, including Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), this article describes a dialectic of science fictionality and post-65 Asian American literature in which the latter develops autopoetic tendencies that register occupational concentration in genre, theme, characterization, and trope. This reorientation of post-65 Asian American literary history to the material conditions of science fictionality, rather than ethnic self-expression, has implications not only for understanding that history but also for generalized periodizations of contemporary US literature like the “genre turn,” which risk eliding the specificity of minority literary histories.

Positionality and Normative Geographies in Native American Women's Writings

The present study aims to revisit Louise Erdrich's Tracks, Polingaysi Qoyawayma's No Turning Back, and Diane Glancy's The Reason for Crows to understand the portrayal of normative geographies in these works. The study considers Tim Cresswell's theoretical formulations of normative geography to explore the constitution and Native American women's positionality within these normative geographic structures. The study maintains that Native American normative geographies are structured to maintain Native American patriarchal socio-cultural supremacy. The study also asserts that Native American woman is located at the margin of these biased normative geographic structures.

Jazz as the Narrative Mode in Toni Morrison’s <i>Jazz</i>

Toni Morrison is the first black American woman writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, for her novel Jazz . In this novel, Morrison ventures a unique narrative mode, the mode of Jazz music. The very name Jazz takes one’s imagination to the world of music and entertainment. Music and Fiction are two entirely different genres. The first one depends on oral quality and the second on print. In Jazz , Morrison skillfully relates these two different genres by blending her language into that music harmoniously. Her versatility lies in the unique combination of the vital Jazz music and the untold tragedy of the black community which is uprooted and relegated to the secondary status. Morrison, in Jazz , by using the complexity and various key elements of Jazz like Polyphony, Improvisation etc., depicts the experiences of the black community in the city of New York during the 1920s, known as the Jazz Age.

Not Feeling Right: Queer Encounters with American Women's Writing

Not Feeling Right: Queer Encounters with American Women's Writing

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Susan Tomlinson Why, with notable exceptions like Patricia Highsmith and Gertrude Stein (an author whose work I am desperate to publish about in Legacy; tell your friends), has the emerging American queer canon centered on male authors; and why has the discourse on American queer writing been largely defined by approaches to male writers and their work? To borrow from "Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?," Mary Helen Washington's presidential address to the American Studies Association in 1997, what happens to queer thought when you put American women writers at its center? What happens to American literary studies when you put women writing queerly at its center? How does that reorientation reshape the work we do and reaffirm its urgency? "American Women's Writing and the Genealogies of Queer Thought," guest-edited by Travis Foster and Timothy Griffiths, is our first special issue since Katherine Adams, Caroline Gebhard, and Sandra Zagarell's "Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson for the Twenty-First Century" (vol. 33, no.2) in 2016. Legacy doesn't publish that many special issues—roughly one every four years—because with only two issues a year and so many general submissions to consider, we are committed to publishing a range of work that spans several centuries of women writing in the United States. Our only criterion for taking on a special issue is that its subject transform existing critical conversations and create new ones in our field and beyond. The articles, archival feature, and review essay in this issue, framed by the guest editors' powerful introduction, will do just that. Just as Washington exhorted the ASA membership to make the association "more than ever a place that encourages, promotes, and supports—consistently and enthusiastically—scholarship which moves us toward institutional change . . . a place in the forefront of American society in the sense that here you have a chance to step outside of the general apartheid mentality that continues to dominate our social life in one form or another," our challenge as a journal is to affirm Legacy as a space that supports and affirms a profession worth saving. [End Page ix] Susan Tomlinson Editor Legacy work cited Washington, Mary Helen. "'Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?': Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 29, 1997." American Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–23. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30041597. Accessed 7 Feb. 2020. Copyright © 2020 The University of Nebraska Press

Introduction: American Women's Writing and the Genealogies of Queer Thought

Introduction: American Women's Writing and the Genealogies of Queer Thought

Ceremonias letradas: representaciones del campo cultural en la narrativa de autoras latinoamericanas y caribeñas de la primera mitad del siglo XX

The purpose of this article is to analyze the representation of the cultural field in the narratives of Caribbean and Latin American women writers during the first half of the 20th century. Despite the modernization of the cultural field and its impact on their literary and intellectual endeavors, these women writers chose not to represent their experiences in the lettered spheres explicitly in their work. We view this representational absence not as disinterest in reflecting on and imagining their professional practice as writers, but rather as the particular way in which these women expressed the difficulties and exclusions they experienced in their contemporary cultural fields. We show how these narratives display a series of scenes in which the main characters engage in reading and cultural activities within private and intimate settings. By analyzing the particular characteristics of these images, we demonstrate how they offer an alternative model of development and cultural interaction to the existing lettered fields of their time.

“Love Applied To Suffering”: Nuns in Contemporary Irish American Fiction

“Love Applied To Suffering”: Nuns in Contemporary Irish American Fiction Sinéad Moynihan (bio) In a New Yorker article anticipating the visit of Pope Francis to Ireland in August 2018, James Carroll reflected on the recent report produced by a Pennsylvania Grand Jury that identified one thousand children (and speculated that there were thousands more) who were abused by three hundred priests over a seventy-year period across six dioceses. Comparing the United States with Ireland, he claimed that “the Irish wound is deeper still.” Citing the revelation that nearly eight hundred infants had died at and had been secretly buried in the grounds of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, Carroll concludes: “there had been monsters not only among the priests but among the sisters” (emphasis added).1 Carroll inadvertently identifies, here, one of the most significant differences in Irish compared with US (particularly, but not exclusively, Irish [End Page 185] American) cultural depictions of the clergy in relation to the abuse scandals that have been revealed over the past twenty years. US literature and culture has dramatized many predatory priests—several of them with Irish names— in narratives that deal predominantly (Spotlight [dir. Tom McCarthy, 2015]) or only tangentially (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri [dir. Martin Mc-Donagh, 2017]) with clerical abuse.2 However, nuns are largely represented not just as innocent of the crimes perpetrated by their male counterparts in the clergy but as themselves beleaguered targets of the Catholic Church’s heavy-handed authoritarianism and/or as heroic defenders of the victims of sexual abuse. In John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, A Parable (2004), set in 1964, a righteous school principal, Sister Aloysius Beauvier, succeeds in having a priest she believes to be a child molester moved to another parish. While the play ends with Sister Aloysius expressing serious “doubts” over her own actions, her concern for the welfare of the child, Donald Muller, is never in question.3 Moreover, the play is dedicated to “the many orders of Catholic nuns who have devoted their lives to serving others in hospitals, schools and retirement homes.”4 Meanwhile, in the much-discussed Netflix documentary series The Keepers (dir. Ryan White, 2017), former students of the Baltimore teacher, Sister Catherine Cesnik, speculate that the nun was murdered in 1969 because she had evidence that a fellow teacher at Archbishop Keough high school, Father Joseph Maskell, had been abusing teenage girls. These examples exist in stark contrast to representations of nuns in Irish culture, in which the “evil” or “sadistic” nun was immortalized at least as far back as 1992 when Patricia Burke Brogan’s play Eclipsed débuted at the Punchbag Theatre in Galway. In February 1996, RTÉ screened the (now infamous) Dear Daughter documentary (dir. Louis Lentin) built upon testimony from Christine Buckley and other victims of abuse at the Goldenbridge Industrial School in Dublin. Since then, we have seen cinematic and literary representations such as The Magdalene Sisters (dir. Peter Mullan, 2002)5, Sinners (dir. Aisling Walsh, 2002), Benjamin Black’s (John Banville’s) Christine Falls (2006), Martin Sixsmith’s The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (2009), adapted as Philomena (dir. Stephen Frears, 2013), all of which portray Irish nuns as complicit—and sometimes active participants—in the physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of women and children. This contribution to the forum will consider two recent novels by Irish American women writers, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour (2017) and Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occasions (2017), which present their readers with nuns who take liberal, if not radical, views on a range of Catholic doctrinal issues such as suicide, contraception, marital infidelity, and homosexuality. While they engage, to an extent, with clerical abuse (and [End Page 186] Sullivan does this more directly than McDermott), both novels ultimately uphold Mary Gordon’s claim that “[a]t least since the priesthood was first shaken by the sexual-abuse scandal two decades ago…America’s nuns have been the de facto leaders of the country’s liberal Catholics, especially those more interested in social justice than in holding the Vatican’s line on sexual politics.”6 The question I want to consider...

A Tribute to Louise DeSalvo (1942–2018)

A Tribute to Louise DeSalvo (1942–2018)

Жіночі голоси протесту: поезія Соні Санчес і Ніккі Джованні

The paper explores contemporary African American women’s protest poetry in the light of the liberation movements of the mid-20th century – Black Power, Black Arts Movement, Second Wave Feminism. The research focuses on political, social, cultural and aesthetic aspects of the Black women’s resistance poetry, its spirited dialogue with the feminist struggle, and undertakes its critical interpretation using the methodological tools of Cultural Studies. The poetics and style of protest poetry by Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni, whose literary works have received little scholarly attention literary studies in Ukraine, are analyzed. Protest poetry is defined as politically and socially engaged verse which is oppositional, contestatory and resistant in its subject matter, as well as in the form of (re)presentation. Focusing on political and societal issues, such as slavery, racism, segregation, gender inequality, African American protest poetry is characterized by discourse of resistance and confrontation, disruption of standard English grammar, as well as conventional spelling and syntax. It is argued that militant poems of Sonia Sanchez are marked by the imitations of black speech rhythms and musical patterns of jazz and blues. Similarly, Nikki Giovanni relies on the oral tradition of African American people while creating poetry which was oriented towards performance. The linguistic content of Sanchez and Giovanni’s verses is lowercase lettering for notions associated with “white america”, obscenities targeted at societal racist practices, and erratic capitalization, nonstandard spacing, onomatopoeic syllables, use of vernacular as markers of Black culture. The works of African American women writers, which are under analysis in the essay, constitute creative poetic responses to traumatic history of African American people. Protest poetry of Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni explicitly express the rhetoric of Black nationalism and comply with the aesthetic principles of the Black Arts movement. They are perceived as consciousness-raising texts by their creators and the audiences they are addressed to. It is argued that although protest and resistance poetry is time- and context-bound, it can transcend the boundaries of historical contexts and act as timeless texts.

Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Development of a Protestant Aesthetic for a Diverse Nation

In “Charlestown,” an historical sketch from her 1871 collection New-England Legends, Harriet Prescott Spofford examines the contest between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism that shaped Americans’ understanding of democracy as well as Spofford’s understanding of her role as an author in an increasingly heterogeneous nation. The sketch focuses on the 1834 burning of the Ursuline Convent and School of Mount Benedict in Charlestown, Massachusetts, by a Protestant mob, an assault that affords Spofford the opportunity to examine the nation’s ability to accommodate difference of all kinds. Spofford adopts a Protestant aesthetic in order to free readers from entrenched bigotry and unify an increasingly diverse nation. She develops a participatory model of creating consensus in an expanding nation that replicates the dynamic of democracy in the public sphere. Spofford’s understanding of the role she plays in the process of imperialism as a woman writer, as well as her sincere efforts to combat bigotry in herself and in her world, require us to reassess her place within the ranks of nineteenth-century American women writers.

Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers

Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers