Literary Women

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. From colonial times, women have been at the forefront of significant developments in the literary community and the book world. Despite this important history, no single publication has provided an overview of women's roles in writing, publishing, bookselling, and librarianship. With WOMEN IN THE LITERARY LANDSCAPE, in honor of its Centennial, the WNBA breaks new ground with a narrative connecting women's contributions in these fields with the relevant social history.

One of the pioneering works of feminist criticism, Literary Women separates women from the mainstram of literary history and examines how the fact that they were women influenced both their lives and their writing. Included are discussions of Jane Austen, George Sand, Colette, Simone Weil, and Virginia Woolf.

Discusses the obstacles women have had to overcome in order to become writers, and identifies the sexist rationalizations used to trivialize their contributions

Ezell critically examines these successful women's literary histories and applies to them the same self-conscious feminism that critics have applied to more traditional methods. Drawing both on French feminisms and on recent historicist scholarship, Ezell points us to new possibilities for the recovery of early modern women's literary history. By championing the recovery of "lost" women writers and insisting on reevaluating the past, women's studies and feminist theory have effected dramatic changes in the ways English literary history is written and taught. In Writing Women's Literary History, Margaret Ezell critically examines these successful women's literary histories and applies to them the same self-conscious feminism that critics have applied to more traditional methods. According to Ezell, by relying not only on past male scholarship but also on inherited notions of "tradition," some feminist historicists replicate the evolutionary, narrative model of history that originally marginalized women who wrote before 1700. Drawing both on French feminisms and on recent historicist scholarship, Ezell points us to new possibilities for the recovery of early modern women's literary history.

From the award-winning author of Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away, the story of a young boy who believes two things: that his Nigerian birth mother loves him like the world has never known love, and that he is a wizard Elijah, seven years old, is covered in scars and has a history of disruptive behavior. Taken away from his birth mother, a Nigerian immigrant in England, Elijah is moved from one foster parent to the next before finding a home with Nikki and her husband, Obi. Nikki believes that she and Obi are strong enough to accept Elijah’s difficulties—and that being white will not affect her ability to raise a black son. They care deeply for Elijah and, in spite of his demons, he begins to settle into this loving family. But as Nikki and Obi learn more about their child’s tragic past, they face challenges that threaten to rock the fragile peace they’ve established, challenges that could prove disastrous.

Violence against Indigenous women in Canada is an ongoing crisis, with roots deep in the nation’s colonial history. Despite numerous policies and programs developed to address the issue, Indigenous women continue to be targeted for violence at disproportionate rates. What insights can literature contribute where dominant anti-violence initiatives have failed? Centring the voices of contemporary Indigenous women writers, this book argues for the important role that literature and storytelling can play in response to gendered colonial violence. Indigenous communities have been organizing against violence since newcomers first arrived, but the cases of missing and murdered women have only recently garnered broad public attention. Violence Against Indigenous Women joins the conversation by analyzing the socially interventionist work of Indigenous women poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and fiction-writers. Organized as a series of case studies that pair literary interventions with recent sites of activism and policy-critique, the book puts literature in dialogue with anti-violence debate to illuminate new pathways toward action. With the advent of provincial and national inquiries into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, a larger public conversation is now underway. Indigenous women’s literature is a critical site of knowledge-making and critique. Violence Against Indigenous Women provides a foundation for reading this literature in the context of Indigenous feminist scholarship and activism and the ongoing intellectual history of Indigenous women’s resistance.

The literature of Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie teaches a risky, self-giving way of reading (and being) that brings home the dangers and the possibilities of suffering as an ethical good. Working the thought of feminist theologians and philosophers into an analysis of these women's writings, Cynthia R. Wallace crafts a literary ethics attentive to the paradoxes of critique and re-vision, universality and particularity, and reads in suffering a redemptive or redeemable reality. Wallace's approach recognizes the generative interplay between ethical form and content in literature, which helps isolate more distinctly the gendered and religious echoes of suffering and sacrifice in Western culture. By refracting these resonances through the work of feminists and theologians of color, her book also shows the value of broad-ranging ethical explorations into literature, with their power to redefine theories of reading and the nature of our responsibility to art and each other.

Meet the women who wrote. They wrote against all odds. Some wrote defiantly; some wrote desperately. Some wrote while trapped within the confines of status and wealth. Some wrote hand-to-mouth in abject poverty. Some wrote trapped in a room of their father’s house, and some went in search of a room of their own. They had lovers and families. They were sometimes lonely. Many wrote anonymously or under a pseudonym for a world not yet ready for their genius and talent. We know many of their names—Austen and Alcott, Brontë and Browning, Wheatley and Woolf—though some may be less familiar. They are here, waiting to introduce themselves. They marched through the world one by one or in small sisterhoods, speaking to each other and to us over distances of place and time. Pushing back against the boundaries meant to keep us in our place, they carved enough space for themselves to write. They made space for us to follow. Here they are gathered together, an army of women who wrote and an arsenal of words to inspire us. They walk with us as we forge our own paths forward. These women wrote to change the world. The perfect keepsake gift for the reader in your life Anthology of stories and poems Book length: approximately 90,000 words