Worlds Within Women: Myth and Mythmaking in Fantastic Literature by Women, and: Radiant Daughters: Fictional American Women, and: Merlin's Daughters: Contemporary Women Writers of Fantasy, and: Forbidden Fruit: On the Relationship between Women and Knowledge in Doris Lessing, Selma Lagerlöf, Kate Chopin, and Margaret Atwood (review)

1987 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 768-770
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Boyd Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Kate Chopin ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
Fantastic Literature ◽  
American Women ◽  
Literature By Women ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Selma Lagerlof

Teaching Nineteenth-Century Women Writers

1991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Lauter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Lydia Maria Child ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Fanny Fern ◽  
American Women ◽  
Copying Machine ◽  
Literature By Women

During the last twenty years the opportunities and challenges to teach nineteenth-century American women writers have widened almost beyond the comprehension of those trained in previous decades. When I was in graduate school in the 1950s at Indiana and Yale, we read Emily Dickinson. Period. Today, that would be considered a scandal. The changes have been great, and good, but they have not been without problems. In this chapter I address a number of what I perceive as significant issues in teaching nineteenth-century American women writers. These I have named the problem of texts, the problem of history, the problem of context, the problem of subject, the problem of form, the problem of difference, and the problem of standards. As will be plain, the names are occasionally arbitrary and the categories somewhat overlap, but they may provide frameworks useful not only for those of us who were expected to know no more than Dickinson, but for those expecting to teach no less than Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Lydia Maria Child. As recently as five years ago, a comprehensive course on nineteenth-century American women writers could only be taught by copious use of the copying machine. For if you wanted your students to know anything by Harper or Child—or even anything about them—you had no choice. That is, beyond the brief anthology selections of seventeen writers (including Harper) one finds in Gilbert and Gubar’s Literature by Women, the nine (spread over two volumes) in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, or the twelve in the recent Harper American Literature, few texts were available. The only piece of Child’s writing then in print was an excerpt from Hobomok (1824) in Lucy Freibert and Barbara White’s useful volume called Hidden Hands. Apart from that book, only Judith Fetterley’s pioneering 1985 collection, Provisions: A Reader from 19th-century American Women, had resurrected such women, and others like Caroline Kirkland, Fanny Fern and Alice Cary, from oblivion.

Virginia Woolf in the Canon of Women’s Literature Narrative Futures of The Feminist Novel

2021 ◽  
pp. 572-589
Author(s):  
Tonya Krouse
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Literature ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Fatima Mernissi ◽  
Zadie Smith ◽  
Female Characterization

Virginia Woolf’s novels have historically been regarded as exceptional for their nuanced characterization, particularly of women, and as foundationally influential to women writers after 1945. This chapter investigates the feminist underpinnings of Woolf’s portrayals of female characters in order to trace Woolf’s ongoing legacy in the feminist writing of today’s women authors. Focusing on three archetypes—the Angel, the Artist, and the Girl—the chapter evaluates Woolf’s techniques for female characterization alongside those deployed by women writers including Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Doris Lessing, Claire Messud, Fatima Mernissi, and Jenni Fagan. These comparative readings show the ways in which Woolf’s fiction inspires contemporary women writers to explore relationships between women and gives them a map for creating complex narratives of affiliation to encompass women’s physical, emotional, and intellectual lives.

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Brazil
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
New Left ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
William Gaddis ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Relationship

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War up to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.

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