This new title brings together overviews and in-depth analysis of hundreds of American women writers, from Colonial America to present day. This work concentrates on women writers of literature, including novels, short stories, poetry, and drama. Essays include a personal biography and a summary of works, with valuable top matter details and further reading sections. The volumes include reviews and excerpts of the writer's most acclaimed works to give the researcher a unique, comprehensive perspective

For centuries women have been marginalized and overlooked in American literary history. That injustice is corrected in this entertaining and provocative collection of 350 years of poetry and fiction by American women. From Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet to Margaret Fuller to Harriet Beecher Stowe, readers will encounter scores of lesser-known and forgotten writers who fully deserve to be rediscovered and enjoyed by new generations. Our famous women writers, including contemporary stars like Annie Proux and Jhumpa Lahiri, are showcased in their full literary context, offering an epic overview of the canon in one monumental, dazzling volume. This landmark anthology features the best work of our best American women, and was inspired and informed by the author's groundbreaking history celebrating women writers, A Jury of Her Peers.

Ann Beattie, Annie Dillard, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Anne Redmon, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker all seem to be especially concerned with narrative management. The ten essays in this book raise new and intriguing questions about the ways these leading women writers appropriate and transform generic norms and ultimately revise literary tradition to make it more inclusive of female experience, vision, and expression. The contributors to this volume discover diverse narrative strategies. Beattie, Dillard, Paley, and Redmon in divergent ways rely heavily upon narrative gaps, surfaces, and silences, often suggesting depths which are lamentably absent from modern experience or which mysteriously elude language. For Kingston and Walker, verbal assertiveness is the focus of narratives depicting the gradual empowerment of female protagonists who learn to speak themselves into existence. Ozick and Tyler disrupt conventional reader expectations of the "anti-novel" and the "family novel," respectively. Finally, Morrison's and Piercy's works reveal how traditional narrative forms such as the Bildungsroman and the "soap opera" are adaptable to feminist purposes. In examining the writings of these ten important women authors, this book illuminates a significant moment in literary history when women's voices are profoundly reshaping American literary tradition.

The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers considers the important literary, historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts of American women authors from the seventeenth century to the present and provides readers with an analysis of current literary trends and debates in women’s literature. This accessible and engaging guide covers a variety of essential topics, such as: the transatlantic and transnational origins of American women's literary traditions the colonial period and the Puritans the early national period and the rhetoric of independence the nineteenth century and the Civil War the twentieth century, including modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights era trends in twenty-first century American women's writing feminism, gender and sexuality, regionalism, domesticity, ethnicity, and multiculturalism. The volume examines the ways in which women writers from diverse racial, social, and cultural backgrounds have shaped American literary traditions, giving particular attention to the ways writers worked inside, outside, and around the strictures of their cultural and historical moments to create space for women’s voices and experiences as a vital part of American life. Addressing key contemporary and theoretical debates, this comprehensive overview presents a highly readable narrative of the development of literature by American women and offers a crucial range of perspectives on American literary history.

A landmark collection documenting the social, political, and artistic lives of African American women throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century. Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2017. The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind: an extraordinary range of voices offering the expressions of African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this collection comprises work from forty-nine writers arranged into sections of memoir, poetry, and essays on feminism, education, and the legacy of African American women writers. Many of these pieces engage with social movements like abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, and civil rights, but the thematic center is the intellect and personal ambition of African American women. The diverse selection includes well-known writers like Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as lesser-known writers like Ella Sheppard, who offers a firsthand account of life in the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Taken together, these incredible works insist that the writing of African American women writers be read, remembered, and addressed. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The early 1890s through the late 1920s saw an explosion in serious long fiction by women in the United States. Considering a wide range of authors--African American, Asian American, white American, and Native American--this book looks at the work of seventeen writers from that period: Frances Ellen Harper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Kate Chopin, Pauline Hopkins, Gertrude Stein, Mary Austin, Sui Sin Far, Willa Cather, Humishuma, Jessie Fauset, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Anzia Yezierska, Edith Summers Kelley, and Nella Larsen. The discussion focuses on the differences in their work and the similarities that unite them, particularly their determination to experiment with narrative form as they explored and voiced issues of power for women. Analyzing the historical context that both enabled and limited American women writers at the turn of the century, Ammons provides detailed readings of many texts and offers extensive commentary on the interaction between race and gender. This book joins the deepening discussion of modern women writers' creation of themselves as artists and raises fundamental questions about the shape of American literary history as it has been constructed in the academy.

In a study that will radically shift our understanding of Civil War literature, Elizabeth Young shows that American women writers have been profoundly influenced by the Civil War and that, in turn, their works have contributed powerfully to conceptions of the war and its aftermath. Offering fascinating reassessments of works by white writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Mitchell and African-American writers including Elizabeth Keckley, Frances Harper, and Margaret Walker, Young also highlights crucial but lesser-known texts such as the memoirs of women who masqueraded as soldiers. In each case she explores the interdependence of gender with issues of race, sexuality, region, and nation. Combining literary analysis, cultural history, and feminist theory, Disarming the Nation argues that the Civil War functioned in women's writings to connect female bodies with the body politic. Women writers used the idea of "civil war" as a metaphor to represent struggles between and within women—including struggles against the cultural prescriptions of "civility." At the same time, these writers also reimagined the nation itself, foregrounding women in their visions of America at war and in peace. In a substantial afterword, Young shows how contemporary black and white women—including those who crossdress in Civil War reenactments—continue to reshape the meanings of the war in ways startlingly similar to their nineteenth-century counterparts. Learned, witty, and accessible, Disarming the Nation provides fresh and compelling perspectives on the Civil War, women's writing, and the many unresolved "civil wars" within American culture today.