"Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive--the second book in a planned experimental triptych--is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story "Evidence," M Archive is told...

"Much of the scholarship published on gay writers in the American South has focused on men, eliding the vibrant history of lesbian authorship and print culture. In The lesbian South, Jamie Harker explores the literature of lesbian-feminist writers, feminist print culture, presses, and bookstores in the post-1960s American South. Harker argues that lesbian presses and bookstores enabled the development of feminist reading and writing communities. These...

Long before Suzanne Collins created Katniss Everdeen and Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower, there were many traditional folktales full of adventure, intrigue, and intrepid female characters. Feminist Folktales from Around the World collects these forgotten classics. Volume four in the series, The Hunter Maiden features an introduction by Renee Watson, the New York Times bestselling author of Piecing Me Together. In these eleven adventures,...

Virginia Woolf, throughout her career as a novelist and critic, deliberately framed herself as a modern writer invested in literary tradition but not bound to its conventions; engaged with politics but not a propagandist; a woman of letters but not a "lady novelist." As a result, Woolf ignored or disparaged most of the women writers of her parents' generation, leading feminist critics to position her primarily as a forward-thinking modernist who rejected...

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a mesmerizing and unsettling exploration of the female psyche and the stifling constraints of 19th-century society. The story is narrated by a woman suffering from what her husband and physicians diagnose as "nervous depression." She is confined to a room in her home and prescribed a treatment of complete rest. As the protagonist spends her days in isolation, she becomes increasingly obsessed...

In a bold and sweeping reevaluation of the past two centuries of women's writing, At Home in the World argues that this body of work has been defined less by domestic concerns than by an active engagement with the most pressing issues of public life: from class and religious divisions, slavery, warfare, and labor unrest to democracy, tyranny, globalism, and the clash of cultures. In this new literary history, Maria DiBattista and Deborah Epstein Nord...

In this compelling interdisciplinary study, Linda Grasso demonstrates that using anger as a mode of analysis and the basis of an aesthetic transforms our understanding of American women's literary history. Exploring how black and white nineteenth-century women writers defined, expressed, and dramatized anger, Grasso reconceptualizes antebellum women's writing and illuminates an unrecognized tradition of discontent in American literature. She maintains...

This highly innovative work on poetic influence among women writers focuses on the relationship between modernist poet Elizabeth Bishop and her mentor Marianne Moore. Departing from Freudian models of influence theory that ignore the question of maternal presence, Joanne Diehl applies the psychoanalytic insights of object relations theorists Melanie Klein and Christopher Bollas to woman-to-woman literary transactions. She lays the groundwork for a...

Rachel C. Lee is Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Drawing on a wide array of literary, historical, and theoretical sources, Rachel Lee addresses current debates on the relationship among Asian American ethnic identity, national belonging, globalization, and gender. Lee argues that scholars have traditionally placed undue emphasis on ethnic-based political commitments--whether these...