Gender and Genre in Literature – Serie

Combining biography, history, and literary theory, this work looks at three of the most significant women writers to emerge from American radicalism of the 1930s. Le Sueur, Olsen, and Herbst were influenced by the Communist movement of the time, but each also forged an independent vision of feminist socialist literary milieu. Drawing on Marxist and post-Marxist theory, and addressing the challenge of such new feminist theorists as Jean Bethke Elshtain, Roberts takes a theoretical approach that encompasses the social vision and feminist practice of the writers and places them in their historical, cultural, and social contexts. The study covers their lives from the turn of the century to the 1970s, with an emphasis on the 1930s; examines their views of the Cold War; links the three to the Progressive tradition; and analyzes their key literary works. Resources for analysis include historical and contemporary theory; excerpts from the radical press of the 1920s and 1930s; and primary materials from the writers themselves, including journals, notes, and unpublished archival materials.

This is the first book-length study of the rich fiction that has emerged from the AIDS crisis. Examining first the ways in which scientific discourse on AIDS has reflected ideologies of gender and sexuality-such as the construction of AIDS as a disease of gay men, part of a battle over masculinity, and thus largely excluding women with AIDS from public attention-the book considers how such discourses have shaped narrative understandings of AIDS. On the one hand, AIDS is seen as an invariably fatal weakening of an individual's bodily defenses, a depiction often used to reconfirm an identification between disease and a weak and vulnerable gayness. On the other hand, AIDS is understood in terms of an epidemic attributable to gay immorality or unnaturalness. The fiction of AIDS depends upon these two narratives, with one major subgenre of AIDS novel presenting narratives of personal illness, decline, and death, and a second focusing on epidemic spread. These novels also question the narrative structures upon which they depend, intervening particularly against the homophobia of those structures, though also sometimes reinforcing it.

This is the first collection of feminist critical essays by and about women in South Africa to appear outside of that country. Many of the pieces were written after February 1990, when President de Klerk lifted the ban on black political organizations. The recognition that a just society cannot be achieved without freedom from gender oppression as well as racial oppression informs these essays and has a direct bearing on the creation of a new society in South Africa.

In Her Own Voice examines the literary history of women’s nonfiction writing through studies of individual writers, their works, and their careers. The essays in this collection consider the development of women’s public voices, relationships between women essayists and their editors and readers.

In an era following the Civil War which saw change and transformation everywhere, new magazines emerged to record and report the change. Responding to the call for material to fill their pages, writers in regions such as New England, the West, and the South answered, most often with short stories. In fact, short fiction became the literature of choice for an emerging mass audience. And increasingly the voices of women writers found resonance in the pages of Harper's New Monthly ,Putnam's , and Galaxy , to name a few of the newly established magazines. In New England, writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Sarah Johnson Prichard, and Rose Terry Cooke found a voice within the pages of these magazines. Although read widely in the late nineteenth century, increasingly these women writers-with a few exceptions-began to be marginalized early-on in the twentieth century. Besides expanding the canon, this collection of selected short stories by these seven New England writers attempts to restore what has been for many of them in this century either a diminished or even a lost voice.

The past decade has given us explorations of such forms as the Bildungsroman, the Kunstleroman, the utopian and Gothic novel as women have written them; studies are even now emerging of the female-authored elegy, sonnet sequence and other pure and mixed poetic modes. Women’s work in non-fiction prose and in the dramatic genres is being resurrected and reassessed. At the same time, feminist critics continue to deconstruct women as signs in patriarchal literary forms, explaining the effect of male gender on structures of signification, the narrative and stylistic codes of genre. This series welcomes such studies, encouraging as well accounts of sexuality and textual inheritance, the influence of female authorship on the evolution of a genre or the creation of a new genre, and challenges to genre theory from a gender perspective.

In Her Own Voice examines the literary history of women’s nonfiction writing through studies of individual writers, their works, and their careers. The essays in this collection consider the development of women’s public voices, relationships between women essayists and their editors and readers.

This is the first collection of feminist critical essays by and about women in South Africa to appear outside of that country. Many of the pieces were written after February 1990, when President de Klerk lifted the ban on black political organizations. The recognition that a just society cannot be achieved without freedom from gender oppression as well as racial oppression informs these essays and has a direct bearing on the creation of a new society in South Africa.

Combining biography, history, and literary theory, this work looks at three of the most significant women writers to emerge from American radicalism of the 1930s. Le Sueur, Olsen, and Herbst were influenced by the Communist movement of the time, but each also forged an independent vision of feminist socialist literary milieu. Drawing on Marxist and post-Marxist theory, and addressing the challenge of such new feminist theorists as Jean Bethke Elshtain, Roberts takes a theoretical approach that encompasses the social vision and feminist practice of the writers and places them in their historical, cultural, and social contexts. The study covers their lives from the turn of the century to the 1970s, with an emphasis on the 1930s; examines their views of the Cold War; links the three to the Progressive tradition; and analyzes their key literary works. Resources for analysis include historical and contemporary theory; excerpts from the radical press of the 1920s and 1930s; and primary materials from the writers themselves, including journals, notes, and unpublished archival materials.