Literary Criticism, Women Authors

Writing an Icon
Celebrity Culture and the Invention of Anaïs Nin
By Anita Jarczok

Before Madonna and her many imitators, there was Anaïs Nin, the diarist, novelist, and provocateur. Jarczok reveals how Nin crafted her personae, which she rewrote and restyled to suit her needs, and how she occupied a singular space in 20th-century culture, as a literary figure, a voice of female sexual liberation, and a celebrity.

Raising the Dust
The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman
By Beth Sutton-Ramspeck

Raising the Dust identifies a heretofore-overlooked literary phenomenon that author Beth Sutton-Ramspeck calls “literary housekeeping.” The three writers she examines rejected turn-of-the-century aestheticism and modernism in favor of a literature that is practical, even ostensibly mundane, designed to “set the human household in order.”To

Writing Women in Central America
Gender and the Fictionalization of History
By Laura Barbas-Rhoden

What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about that past?Writing Women in Central America explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts. This study analyzes how authors appropriate history to confront the rhetoric of the state, global economic powers, and even dissident groups within their own cultures.

Writing Women in Central America
Gender and the Fictionalization of History
By Laura Barbas-Rhoden

What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about that past?Writing Women in Central America explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts. This study analyzes how authors appropriate history to confront the rhetoric of the state, global economic powers, and even dissident groups within their own cultures.

Dark Smiles
Race and Desire in George Eliot
By Alicia Carroll

Although George Eliot has long been described as “the novelist of the Midlands,” she often brought the outer reaches of the empire home in her work. Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot studies Eliot’s problematic, career-long interest in representing racial and ethnic Otherness.Placing

Our Lady of Victorian Feminism
The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot
By Kimberly VanEsveld Adams

Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three nineteenth-century women (Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot), Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women.

The Culture of Christina Rossetti
Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts
Edited by Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra

The Culture of Christina Rossetti explores a “new” Christina Rossetti as she emerges from the scrutiny of the particular historical and cultural context in which she lived and wrote. The essays in this collection demonstrate how the recluse, saint, and renunciatory spinster of former studies was in fact an active participant in her society’s attempt to grapple with new developments in aesthetics, theology, science, economics, and politics.The

Womanist and Feminist Aesthetics
A Comparative Review
By Tuzyline Jita Allan

Alice Walker’s womanist theory about black feminist identity and practice also contains a critique of white liberal feminism. This is the first in-depth study to examine issues of identity and difference within feminism by drawing on Walker’s notion of an essential black feminist consciousness.Allan defines womanism as a “(r)evolutionary aesthetic that seeks to fully realize the feminist goal of resistance to patriarchal domination,” demonstrated most powerfully in The Color Purple.

Claribel Alegría and Central American Literature
Critical Essays
Edited by Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval and Marcia Phillips McGowan

These essays examine the multifaceted work of the Central American author whom Latin American literary historians consider precursor of “cultural dialogism” in poetry and fiction. As poet, essayist, journalist, novelist, and writer of “quasi–testimonio,” Alegría’s multiple discourses transgress the boundaries between traditional and postmodern political theories and practices.