Tracing Arachne S Web

"I am particularly impressed with Bloomberg's insights about the ways in which women writers' urge to harness the power of women's myths has to some extent been aroused by historical forces. . . . She explains that women's desire to reinvent their identities requires that women writers take over the narrative tools (such as mythic allusions) provided them by male writers and use those tools to build their own textual 'house.'"--Mary Lowe-Evans, University of West Florida Tracing Arachne's Web examines the use of myth in works by American women novelists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, showing how both classical allusions and ethnic folk myth liberated these writers and enabled them to understand and experience their social and economic worlds. Using the metaphor of Demeter and Persephone as her framework, Kristin Mapel Bloomberg identifies a cycle in women's fiction that moves from the utopian world of Demeter's garden in the late 19th century to the experience of isolated women in the patriarchal underworld of literary modernism. Examining the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Emma D. Kelley-Hawkins, Onoto Watanna (aka Winnifred Eaton), Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Edith Wharton, and Djuna Barnes, she develops a model of women's writing that ties these writers' fascination with the occult and Greek mythology to T. S. Eliot's notion of the "mythical method." Drawing from history and popular culture, she demonstrates how women of color responded to many of the same cultural currents as white writers. She does this, moreover, by analyzing the coded strategies followed by women of color to get their books into print, without collapsing race into gender issues. Invariably provocative, Bloomberg's writing creates a picture of female power in turn-of-the-century American fiction in which women writers turned to alternative spiritual ideologies and occult philosophies to investigate tensions between racism, sexism, and classicism. This book will appeal to scholars in American studies, literary criticism, women's studies, and cultural studies. Kristin M. Mapel Bloomberg, associate professor of English and women's studies at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, holds the Hamline University Chair in the Humanities and is also Director of the Women's Studies Program.

Mapping the history of digital literary scholarship, Earhart stakes a claim for discipline-specific histories of digital study

“A fascinating biography of a fascinating woman.” - Booklist, starred review “This definitive look at a remarkable figure delivers the goods.” - Publishers Weekly, starred review "A brilliant analysis." - Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize winner Featured in Ms. Magazine's "Most Anticipated Reads for the Rest of Us 2022" (books by or about historically excluded groups) Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who was formerly enslaved and a father of questionable identity, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneering activist, writer, suffragist, and educator. Until now, Dunbar-Nelson has largely been viewed only in relation to her abusive ex-husband, the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. This is the first book-length look at this major figure in Black women's history, covering her life from the post-reconstruction era through the Harlem Renaissance. Tara T. Green builds on Black feminist, sexuality, historical and cultural studies to create a literary biography that examines Dunbar-Nelson's life and legacy as a respectable activist – a woman who navigated complex challenges associated with resisting racism and sexism, and who defined her sexual identity and sexual agency within the confines of respectability politics. It's a book about the past, but it's also a book about the present that nods to the future.

A comprehensive encyclopedia tracing the history of the women's rights movement in the United States from the American Revolution to the present day. Few realize that the origin of the discussion on women's rights emerged out of the anti-slavery movement of the 19th century, and that suffragists were active in the peace and labor movements long after the right to vote was granted. Thus began the confluence of activism in our country, where the rights of women both followed—and led—the social and political discourse in America. Through 4 volumes and more than 800 entries, editor Tiffany K. Wayne, with advising editor Lois Banner, examine the issues, people, and events of women's activism, from the early period of American history to the present time. This comprehensive reference not only traces the historical evolution of the movement, but also covers current issues affecting women, such as reproductive freedom, political participation, pay equity, violence against women, and gay civil rights.

Women readers, editors, librarians, authors, journalists, booksellers, and others are the subjects in this stimulating new collection on modern print culture. The essays feature women like Marie Mason Potts, editor of Smoke Signals, a mid-twentieth century periodical of the Federated Indians of California; Lois Waisbrooker, publisher of books and journals on female sexuality and women's rights in the decades after the Civil War; and Elizabeth Jordan, author of two novels and editor of Harper's Bazaar from 1900 to 1913. The volume presents a complex and engaging picture of print culture and of the forces that affected women's lives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Published in collaboration among the University of Wisconsin Press, the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America (a joint program of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society), and the University of Wisconsin–Madison General Library System Office of Scholarly Communication.

Examining the intersection of occult spirituality, text, and gender, this book provides a compelling analysis of the occult revival in literature from the 1880s through the course of the twentieth century. Bestselling novels such as The Da Vinci Code play with magic and the fascination of hidden knowledge, while occult and esoteric subjects have become very visible in literature during the twentieth century. This study analyses literature by women occultists such as Alice Bailey, Dion Fortune, and Starhawk, and revisits texts with occult motifs by canonical authors such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Leonora Carrington, and Angela Carter. This material, which has never been analysed in a literary context, covers influential movements such as Theosophy, Spiritualism, Golden Dawn, Wicca, and Goddess spirituality. Wallraven engages with the question of how literature functions as the medium for creating occult worlds and powerful identities, particularly the female Lucifer, witch, priestess, and Goddess. Based on the concept of ancient wisdom, the occult in literature also incorporates topical discourses of the twentieth century, including psychoanalysis, feminism, pacifism, and ecology. Hence, as an ever-evolving discursive universe, it presents alternatives to religious truth claims that often lead to various forms of fundamentalism that we encounter today. This book offers a ground-breaking approach to interpreting the forms and functions of occult texts for scholars and students of literary and cultural studies, religious studies, sociology, and gender studies.

Examining the appropriation of transgressive, violent female figures from ancient Greek literature and myth by late Victorian writers, Olverson reveals the extent to which ancient antagonists like the murderous Medea and the sinister Circe were employed as a means to protest against and comment upon contemporary social and political institutions.

The Lost Girls analyses a number of British writers between 1850 and 1930 for whom the myth of Demeter’s loss and eventual recovery of her cherished daughter Kore-Persephone, swept off in violent and catastrophic captivity by Dis, God of the Dead, had both huge personal and aesthetic significance. This book, in addition to scrutinising canonical and less well-known texts by male authors such as Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, also focuses on unjustly neglected women writers – Mary Webb and Mary Butts – who utilised occult tropes to relocate themselves culturally, and especially in Butts’s case to recover and restore a forgotten legacy, the myth of matriarchal origins. These novelists are placed in relation not only to one another but also to Victorian archaeologists and especially to Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), one of the first women to distinguish herself in the history of British Classical scholarship and whose anthropological approach to the study of early Greek art and religion both influenced – and became transformed by – the literature. Rather than offering a teleological argument that moves lock-step through the decades, The Lost Girls proposes chapters that detail specific engagements with Demeter-Persephone through which to register distinct literary-cultural shifts in uses of the myth and new insights into the work of particular writers.