Literary Criticism : Women Authors

Sharon Creech, the only author for adolescents to receive both the Newbery Medal (1994) and the Carnegie Medal (2002) writes artistically rich books that reveal her fingerprints as a former teacher. more...

Price: $49.50

An edition and translation of some 30 poems by the trobairitz, a remarkable group of women poets from the 12th and 13th centuries, who composed in the style and language of the troubadours. more...

Price: $34.95

Traces the tradition of Spanish women's writing from the end of the Romantic period until the present day. Professor Davies places the major authors within the changing political, cultural and economic context of women's lives over the past century-and-a-half -- with particular attention to women's accounts of female subjectivity in relation to the Spanish nation-state, government politics, and the women's liberation movement. more...

Price: $170.00

Adapts Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque, as well as the latest in gender and psychoanalytic theory, to the major works of acclaimed southern writer Carson McCullers. This innovative reconsideration of the themes of Carson McCullers's fiction argues that her work has heretofore suffered under the pall of narrow gothic interpretations, obscuring a more subversive agenda. By examining McCullers's major novels—The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe—Gleeson-White locates a radical and specific form of the grotesque in the author's fiction: the liberating and redemptive possibilities of errant gender roles and shifting sexuality. She does this by employing Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque, which is both affirming and revolutionary, and thereby moves McCullers's texts beyond the 'gloom and doom' with which they have been charged for over fifty years.The first chapter explores female adolescence by focusing on McCullers's tomboys in the context of oppressive southern womanhood. The second chapter analyzes McCullers's fascinating struggle to depict homosexual desire outside of traditional stereotypes. Gleeson-White then examines McCullers's portrayals of feminine and masculine gender through the tropes of cross-dressing, transvestism, and masquerade. The final chapter takes issue with earlier readings of androgyny in the texts to suggest a more useful concept McCullers herself called "the hybrid." Underpinning the whole study is the idea of a provocative, dynamic form of the grotesque that challenges traditional categories of normal and abnormal.Because the characters and themes of McCullers's fiction were created in the 1940s and 1950s, a time of tension between the changing status of women and the southern ideal of womanhood, they are particularly fertile ground for a modern reexamination of this more...

Price: $28.00

''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. more...

Price: $59.95