Description
Literary Nonfiction. Fiction. Neither narrowly canonical nor exclusively literary, this 1200-page anthology features women's voices as they appear in nontraditional public formats, such as trial transcripts, petitions and criminal confessions. It includes women's writing in public formats other than just print, including speeches and song lyrics. It also features expanded selections from Chicanas, working class women and antebellum Native American women, as well as thematic concerns with disability, women's sexuality, immigration and diaspora, women's suffrage, and lynching. And it offers expanded selections of plays, including temperance and "minstrel" plays; travel narratives; as well as a broader range of fiction from both women's magazines and "literary" magazines. The aim of VOLUME ONE: 17TH THROUGH 19TH CENTURIES is to show when and where and how women entered into public discourse pre-20th century, and how that access varied according to race, national origin, class, education, geographical location, physical ability, etc. as well as how it varied over the two centuries. Some of these materials have not been reprinted since their original publication; many have never been available in "literature" or "women writers" anthologies.
"This is a beautifully crafted, thoughtfully inclusive anthology of US women's writings. The depth and breadth of texts will make it invaluable for a wide range of courses and disciplines. The editors' attention to diversity of writers is matched with diversity of genres, styles, and perspectives. With incisive headnotes and a richness of content unequalled in currently available anthologies of US women's writings, this is the anthology for which we have all been waiting."—Sharon M. Harris, Lorraine Sherley
"This wide-ranging, compelling anthology of well-known, lesser-known and virtually unknown US women writers shows that US women have participated vigorously and imaginatively in public discourse from the beginning. It will be invaluable for students, teachers, and scholars of women writers and of American literature across the board."—Sandra A. Zagarell
"This anthology adds new dimensoins to our sense of women's contributions to American culture and helps us to undrestand our own history in more complex ways... A welcome contribution to American social, intellectual, cultural and literary histories."—Cheryl Walker
"I am grateful for the introduction that the anthology provides to women writers with whom I am unfamiliar and for the new insights it offers into many of those with whom I have lived for years. This anthology is more than a collection of literary works; it is a study in the access that literature gives us to the past and a commentary on the terms through which we endless construct it."—Priscilla Wald