The essays in this collection examine the connections between the forces of empire and women's lives in the early Americas, in particular the ways their narratives contributed to empire formation. Focusing on the female body as a site of contestation, the essays describe acts of bravery, subversion, and survival expressed in a variety of genres, including the saga, letter, diary, captivity narrative, travel narrative, verse, sentimental novel, and autobiography. The volume also speaks to a range of female experience, across the Americas and across time, from the Viking exploration to early nineteenth-century United States, challenging scholars to reflect on the implications of early American literature even to the present day.

This volume studies processes of creating voices of the past to analyze and to juxtapose, discussing the nature of the educational community viewed through feminist theory to reveal hidden ideas surrounding stereotypes, gender status, and power in the postcolonial era. The contributions brought together here explore the various facets of language to focus on metaphorical grammatical constructions, unique and specific with form and function. They interpret various works to capture the essence of style, as well as rhetorical function of basic structure of grammar, diction and syntax, in a literary work as message and meaning. Furthermore, the book also discusses useful pedagogical and theoretical processes used by the literary scholar concerning the power of writing for cultural change. As such, the book will appeal to those who wish to heal through writing. The proceeds of the book support the authors’ local soup kitchen and crisis centers for domestic abuse.

Raising key questions about race, class, sexuality, age, material culture, intellectual history, pedagogy, and gender, this book explores the myriad relationships between feminist thinking and Little Women, a novel that has touched many women's lives. A critical introduction traces 130 years of popular and critical response, and the collection presents 11 new essays, two new bibliographies, and reprints of six classic essays. The contributors examine the history of illustrating Little Women; Alcott's use of domestic architecture as codes of female self-expression; the tradition of utopian writing by women; relationship to works by British and African American writers; recent thinking about feminist pedagogy; the significance of the novel for women writers, and its implications from the vantage points of middle-aged scholar, parent, and resisting male reader.

The field of American women's writing is one characterized by innovation: scholars are discovering new authors and works, as well as new ways of historicizing this literature, rethinking contexts, categories and juxtapositions. Now, after three decades of scholarly investigation and innovation, the rich complexity and diversity of American literature written by women can be seen with a new coherence and subtlety. Dedicated to this expanding heterogeneity, The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature develops and challenges historical, cultural, theoretical, even polemical methods, all of which will advance the future study of American women writers – from Native Americans to postmodern communities, from individual careers to communities of writers and readers. This volume immerses readers in a new dialogue about the range and depth of women's literature in the United States and allows them to trace the ever-evolving shape of the field.

The essays in this collection offer readers vivid and varied evidence of the female response to recurring attempts by culture to artificially limit identity along the gendered lines of private and public experience. Calling on voices both familiar and little-known, British and American, black and white, young and old, poor and rich, heterosexual and lesbian, the essayists explore how women within unique personal and historical conditions used life-writing as a means of both self-understanding and connection to a community of sympathetic others, real or imagined. The life-writings within this anthology span the modern history of the genre itself, with writers drawn from as early as the seventeenth century and as late as the 1990s.

American literature abounds with orphans who experience adoption or placements that resemble adoption. These stories do more than recount adventures of children living away from home. They tell an American story of family and national identity. In narratives from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, adoption functions as narrative event and trope that describes the American migratory experience, the impact of Calvinist faith, and the growth of democratic individualism. The roots of literary adoption appear in the discourse of Puritan settlers, who ambivalently took leave of their birth parent country and portrayed themselves as abandoned children. Believing they were chosen children of God, they also prayed for spiritual adoption and emulated God's grace by extending adoption to others. Nineteenth-century adoption literature develops from this notion of adoption as salvation and from simultaneous attachments to the Old World and the New. In domestic fiction of the mid-nineteenth century, adoption also reflects a focus on nurture in childrearing, increased mobility in the nation, and middle-class concerns over immigration and urbanization, assuaged when the orphan finds a proper, loving home. Adoption signals fresh starts and the opportunity for success without genealogical constraints, especially for white males, but inflected by gender and racial biases, it often entails dependency for girls and children of color. A complex signifier of difference, adoption gives voice to sometimes contradictory calls to origins and fresh beginning; to feelings of worthiness and unworthiness. In writings from Cotton Mather to Edith Wharton, it both replicates and offers an alternative to the genealogical norm, evoking ambivalence as it shapes national mythologies.