Looking at travel writing by British women from the seventeenth century on, Karen R. Lawrence asks an intriguing question: What happens when, instead of waiting patiently for Odysseus, Penelope ...voyages and records her journey—when the woman who is expected to waitsets forth herself and traces an itinerary of her own? Lawrence ranges widely, discussing both fiction and nonfiction and traversing the genres of travel letters, realistic and sentimental novels, ethnography, fantasy, and postmodern narrative. In examining works as dissimilar as Margaret Cavendish's rendition of the Renaissance adventure narrative and Christine Brooke-Rose's postmodernist Between, she explores not only the significance of gender for travel writing, but also the value of travel itself for testing the limits of women's social freedoms and restraints. Lawrence shows how writings by Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sarah Lee, Mary Kingsley, Virginia Woolf, and Brigid Brophy reconceive the meanings of femininity in relation to such apparent oppositions as travel/home, other/self, and foreign/domestic. Despite the differences-historical, generic, political-among these writers, Lawrence maintains, they share common insights. Their accounts overturn the dichotomy between adventure and domesticity, demonstrating something illusory within both the stability of home and the freedom of travel.
Speaking Power Fulton Minor, DoVeanna S
2012, 2006
eBook
In Speaking Power, DoVeanna S. Fulton explores and analyzes the use of oral traditions in African American women's autobiographical and fictional narratives of slavery. African American women have ...consistently employed oral traditions not only to relate the pain and degradation of slavery, but also to celebrate the subversions, struggles, and triumphs of Black experience. Fulton examines orality as a rhetorical strategy, its role in passing on family and personal history, and its ability to empower, subvert oppression, assert agency, and create representations for the past. In addition to taking an insightful look at obscure or little-studied slave narratives like Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon and the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Fulton also brings a fresh perspective to more familiar works, such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, and highlights Black feminist orality in such works as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Gayl Jones's Corregidora.
River Teeth Joe Mackall, Daniel W. Lehman / Joe Mackall, Daniel W. Lehman
2020
eBook
Nationally recognized River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative has published a host of new and significant voices in creative nonfiction—including essays, memoir, and literary journalism—since ...1999. To celebrate twenty years of introducing talented new writers to readers and publishing great nonfiction, the founding editors, Joe Mackall and Daniel W. Lehman, have selected their all-time favorite essays published in River Teeth in this stunning collection. Essays include up-and-coming authors as well as luminaries such as Ann Hood, Lee Martin, Chris Offutt, Angela Morales, Brenda Miller, Judith Kitchen, Ted Kooser, and Andre Dubus III. River Teeth: Twenty Years of Creative Nonfiction further includes a thoughtful foreword by Robert Atwan that illuminates the importance, breadth, and reach of the journal and shows the diversity of nonfiction writing available in the twenty-first century. A trailblazing publication since its inception, River Teeth continues to share the important work of contemporary writers and will thrive for years to come.
This book offers a guided introduction to Chinese nonfictional prose and its literary and cultural significance. It features more than one hundred major texts from antiquity through the Qing dynasty ...that exemplify major genres, styles, and forms of traditional Chinese prose.
What does it really mean when people are viewed as bytes of data? And is there beauty or an imaginative potential to information culture and the databases cataloging it? As Too Numerous reveals, the ...raw material of bytes and data points can be reshaped and repurposed for ridiculous, melancholic, and even aesthetic purposes.
Grappling with an information culture that is both intimidating and daunting, Kent Shaw considers the impersonality represented by the continuing accumulation of personal information and the felicities -- and barriers -- that result: "The us that was inside us was magnificent structures. And they weren't going to grow any larger."
Este artículo compara y contrasta la concepción que Octavio Paz y Luis Cernuda defendían del surrealismo en los años cincuenta del siglo xx; examina el interés en el poema en prosa surrealista ...compartido por ambos; coteja la visión del amor expresada en la poesía surrealista de ambos; y también señala ejemplos de la influencia mutua que caracterizó el diálogo entre los dos poetas en aquellos años.
This paper compares and contrasts the notion of surrealism defended by Octavio Paz and Luis Cernuda during the 1950's; it examines the interest shared by both in the surrealist prose poem; it analyses the vision of love expressed by both poets in their surrealist poetry; and also points to the mutual influence that characterized the dialogue between the two poets at that time.
In the world of My Gay Middle Ages, Chaucer and Boethius are the secret-sharers of A.W. Strouse’s “gay lifestyle.” Where many scholars of the Middle Ages would “get in from behind” on cultural ...history, Strouse instead does a “reach around.” He eschews academic “queer theory” as yet another tedious, normative framework, and writes in the long, fruity tradition of irresponsible, homo-medievalism (a lineage that includes luminaries like Oscar Wilde, who was sustained by his amateur readings of Dante and Abelard during the darks days of his incarceration for crimes of “gross indecency”). Strouse experiences medieval literature and philosophy as a part of his everyday life, and in these prose poems he makes the case for regarding the Middle Ages as a kind of technology of self-preservation, a posture through which to spiritualize the petty indignities of modern urban life. With a Warholian flair for insouciant name-dropping and a Steinian appetite for syntactic perversion, Strouse monumentalizes the medieval within the contemporary and the contemporary within the medieval.
Winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets prizeHow can a search for self†'knowledge reveal art as a site of community? Yanyi's arresting and straightforward poems weave experiences of ...immigration as a Chinese American, of racism, of mental wellness, and of gender from a queer and trans perspective. Between the contrast of high lyric and direct prose poems, Yanyi invites the reader to consider how to speak with multiple identities through trauma, transition, and ordinary life. These poems constitute an artifact of a groundbreaking and original author whose work reflects a long journey self†'guided through tarot, therapy, and the arts. Foregrounding the power of friendship, Yanyi's poems converse with friends as much as with artists both living and dead, from Agnes Martin to Maggie Nelson to Robin Coste Lewis. This instructive collection gives voice to the multifaceted humanity within all of us and inspires attention, clarity, and hope through art-making and community.
As autobiographies by famous women like Eleanor Roosevelt and
Amelia Earhart became bestsellers in the 1930s, American publishers
sought out literary autobiographies from female novelists, poets,
...salon hosts, and editors. Templates for Authorship
analyzes the market and cultural forces that created an
unprecedented boom in American women's literary autobiography.
Windy Counsell Petrie considers twelve autobiographies from a
diverse group of writers, ranging from highbrow modernists such as
Gertrude Stein and Harriet Monroe to popular fiction writers like
Edith Wharton and Edna Ferber, and lesser known figures such as
Grace King and Carolyn Wells. Since there were few existing
examples of women's literary autobiography, these writers found
themselves marketed and interpreted within four cultural templates:
the artist, the activist, the professional, and the celebrity. As
they wrote their life stories, the women adapted these templates to
counter unwanted interpretations and resist the sentimental
feminine traditions of previous generations with innovative
strategies of deferral, elision, comedy, and collaboration. This
accessible study contends that writing autobiography offered each
of these writers an opportunity to define and defend her own
literary legacy.
