Challenging Boundaries
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Challenging Boundaries

Gender and Periodization

Title Details

Pages: 320

Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 03/16/2000

ISBN: 9-780-8203-2124-0

List Price: $34.95

Hardcover

Pub Date: 04/01/2017

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5217-6

List Price: $93.95

Challenging Boundaries

Gender and Periodization

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  • Description
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  • Contributors

What if the American literary canon were expanded to consistently represent women writers, who do not always fit easily into genres and periods established on the basis of men's writings? How would the study of American literature benefit from this long-needed revision? This timely collection of essays by fourteen women writers breaks new ground in American literary study. Not content to rediscover and awkwardly "fit" female writers into the "white male" scheme of anthologies and college courses, editors Margaret Dickie and Joyce W. Warren question the current boundaries of literary periods, advocating a revised literary canon. The essays consider a wide range of American women writers, including Mary Rowlandson, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Frances Harper, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell and Adrienne Rich, discussing how the present classification of these writers by periods affects our reading of their work.

Beyond the focus of feminist challenges to American literary periodization, this volume also studies issues of a need for literary reforms considering differences in race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. The essays are valuable and informative as individual critical studies of specific writers and their works. Challenging Boundaries presents intelligent, original, well-written, and practical arguments in support of long-awaited changes in American literary scholarship and is a milestone of feminist literary study.

Keenly relevant essays that speak to one of the most enduring—and provocative—critical issues in the study of literature.

—Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Flavored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family

Carla Peterson

Amelia María de la Luz Montes

Carol J. Singley

Crystal Lucky

Jacqueline Vaught Brogan

Josephine Donovan

Mary Loeffelholz

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Susan McCabe

Sylvia Henneberg

Teresa A. Toulouse

About the Author/Editor

Joyce W. Warren (Editor)
JOYCE W. WARREN is a professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.

Margaret Dickie (Editor)
MARGARET DICKIE was the Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Georgia.