Unfinished Spirit

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein is Professor of gender studies and twentieth- and twenty-first-century women's writing at the University of Bristol. She is the coeditor of The Muriel Rukeyser Era and author of a forthcoming biography of Rukeyser, Mother of Us All. Follow her on X at @rowena_k_e.

Unfinished Spirit is a bracing work of scholarly devotion. Alongside plenty of original readings and fresh interpretation, Kennedy-Epstein manages the uncanny trick of presenting us with Rukeyser at work, thinking and feeling her way through the catastrophes of her epoch. The reader comes away from the book enlivened and encouraged and enraged.(Women: A Cultural Review) Adventurous, painstaking, and thought-provoking, Unfinished Spirit will draw students of Rukeyser and twentieth-century American culture to think outside familiar literary historical boxes.(Modern Philology) Rukeyser's intervention in modernism with this avant-garde novel—and the obstruction of her career by misogynist expectations for women writers—are increasingly the focus of scholars eager to work on something new about the modernist novel and/or the Spanish Civil War.(Feminist Modernist Studies) A work of bold originality and personal, passionate scholarship Rukeyser's archival writing provides an invaluable perspective on our times and a guide to moving forward (particularly in our era of revived book banning) with her characteristic belief in possibility, in process and potential.(The Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive) The importance of Kennedy-Epstein's archival research and recovery of Rukeyser's unpublished and unfinished work cannot be overstated. Unfinished Spirit will be essential to the study of Rukeyser and to left women's writing going forward.(Against the Current) What Rukeyser did for others—speaking on their behalf, calling their work and their lives to the surface of consciousness—the editors seek to do for her. In The Muriel Rukeyser Era, they revive Rukeyser, and with her, offer a reminder of her times.(Textual Cultures)

• Introduction: Waste/Archives/FeminismPart I: Novel Proliferations: The Spanish Civil War, 1936–19741. Costa Brava2. Her Symbol Was Civil War: Recovering Savage Coast3. Mother of Exiles: Spanish Civil War WritingPart II: Being Process Itself: Feminism, Collaboration, and Influence4. Bad Influence and Willful Subjects: The Life of Poetry, "Many Keys," and Sunday at Nine5. So Easy to See: The Unfinished Collaboration with Berenice Abbott6. Pillars of Process: Franz Boas, Birth, and Indigenous ThoughtConclusion: The Rukeyser Era