Download or read book Persephone in America written by Alison Townsend and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2009-02-25 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Persephone in America, Alison Townsend deftly weaves autobiography with myth in this reinvention of the tale of Demeter and Persephone as seen from the modern woman’s perspective. Fraught with emotional honesty, this captivating collection of lyrical and narrative poems chronicles the struggles of the figurative Persephone in three parts—the abduction, descent to the underworld, and return. Townsend turns a shrewd eye to her own experiences, as well as to the lives of other women, to offer an unflinching yet deeply compassionate exploration of such themes as girlhood and the vulnerability of the motherless; the demons of depression, addiction, and abuse; as well as passion, aging, and celebration of the natural world. Although the poems traverse dark emotional territory at times, the picture that emerges ultimately is one of revelation and wisdom. Persephone in America is above all a journey of the soul, following the narrator as she explores what it means to be a woman in America, at times descending into darkness, only to emerge into redemption and realize “time’s sweet and invincible secret—that everything repeats—and we watch it.” Townsend’s candid portrait of female loss and discovery seeks to illuminate the truths inherent in myth, and the awakenings that hide in our darkest moments. Persephone, Pretending (Madison, Wisconsin) When the news says that the girl who had been missing almost four days, only to be found in a marshy area at the edge of our medium-sized city, was faking it all along, I wondered what made her do it. I'd seen her face—bright smile, dark eyes— on a flier masking-taped to a pillar at the airport the week before, felt the involuntary frisson of the curious, then only fear at the thought of a girl abducted in this place once voted "America's most livable city." She must have wanted something she couldn't name, that good girl with good grades who looks like so many girls in my own classes, but who keeps changing her story. It happened here; no, it happened there; no, I really just wanted to be alone. Then she turns her face away, tired of telling her tale, not sure what to make up next or where invention will take her. “Fictitious victimization disorder,” Time magazine claims, but I wonder what else, imagining her in the marsh, cold, unrepentant, powerless, her mind gone muddy with lack of sleep, no way out of this lie she almost believes, or the lies ahead, nothing but memory of the rope, duct tape, cough medicine, and knife she bought at the PDQ with her own cash, wanting to be taken by someone so badly, she takes us, she does it to herself.
Download or read book Sarah Orne Jewett an American Persephone written by Sarah Way Sherman and published by University Press of New England. This book was released on 1989 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tale of Demeter and Persephone, a central myth of Victorian women's culture, is used to interpret the life and work of a 19th-century Maine writer.
Download or read book African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition written by T. Walters and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-10-29 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a groundbreaking study exploring the significant relationship between western classical mythology and African American women's literature. A comparative analysis of classical revisions by eighteenth and nineteenth century Black women writers Phillis Wheatley and Pauline Hopkins and twentieth century writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove reveals that Black women writers revise specific classical myths for artistic and political agency. The study demonstrates that women rework myth to represent mythical stories from the Black female perspective and to counteract denigrating contemporary cultural and social myths that disempower and devalue Black womanhood. Through their adaptations of classical myths about motherhood, Wheatley, Ray, Brooks, Morrison, and Dove uncover the shared experiences of mythic mothers and their contemporary African American counterparts thus offering a unique Black feminist perspective to classicism. The women also use myth as a liberating space where they can 'speak the unspeakable' and empower their subjects as well as themselves.
Download or read book Sarah Orne Jewett an American Persephone written by Sarah Way Sherman and published by University Press of New England. This book was released on 1989 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tale of Demeter and Persephone, a central myth of Victorian women's culture, is used to interpret the life and work of a 19th-century Maine writer.
Download or read book American Persephone written by Sarah Way Sherman and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 1414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The American Persephone written by Candace Jane Waid and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Companion to American Fiction 1865 1914 written by Robert Paul Lamb and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 is a groundbreaking collection of essays written by leading critics for a wide audience of scholars, students, and interested general readers. An exceptionally broad-ranging and accessible Companion to the study of American fiction of the post-civil war period and the early twentieth century Brings together 29 essays by top scholars, each of which presents a synthesis of the best research and offers an original perspective Divided into sections on historical traditions and genres, contexts and themes, and major authors Covers a mixture of canonical and the non-canonical themes, authors, literatures, and critical approaches Explores innovative topics, such as ecological literature and ecocriticism, children’s literature, and the influence of Darwin on fiction
Download or read book Persephone Rises 1860 1927 written by Margot K. Louis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the nineteenth century, the figure of Persephone rapidly evolved from what was essentially a decorative metaphor into a living goddess who embodied the most spiritual aspects of ancient Greek religion. In the first comprehensive survey of the Persephone myth in English and American literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Margot Louis explores the transformation of the goddess to provide not only a basis for understanding how the study of ancient history informed the creation of a new spirituality but for comprehending the deep and bitter tensions surrounding gender that interacted with this process. Beginning with an overview of the most influential ancient texts on Persephone and references to Persephone in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Romantic period writing, Louis shows that the earliest theories of matriarchy and patriarchal marriage emerged in the 1860s alongside the first English poems to explore Persephone's story. As scholars began to focus on the chthonic Mystery cults, and particularly on the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, poets and novelists explored the divisions between mother and daughter occasioned by patriarchal marriage. Issues of fertility and ritual resonate in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Willa Cather's My Antonia, while the first advance of a neo-pagan spirituality, as well as early feminist critiques of male mythography and of the Persephone myth, emerge in Modernist poems and fictions from 1908 to 1927. Informed by the latest research and theoretical work on myth, Margot Louis's fascinating study shows the development of Victorian mythography in a new light; offers original takes on Victorian representations of gender and values; exposes how differently male and female Modernists dealt with issues of myth, ritual, and ancient spirituality; and uncovers how deeply the study of ancient spirituality is entwined with controversies about gender.
Download or read book Re Placing America written by Ruth Hsu and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays and poems examines various recent literary texts and cultural arenas in North America and the Asia and Pacific regions for what they reveal of the ongoing struggles of indigenous people and people of colour for justice and autonomy.
Download or read book Four Stories by American Women written by Various and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1990-12-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representing four prominent American women writers who flourished in the period following the Civil War, this collection includes "Life in the Iron Mills" by Rebecca Harding Davis, "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Country of the Pointed Firs" by Sarah Orne Jewett, and "Souls Belated" by Edith Wharton. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book The Nineteenth Century Revis it ed written by Ina Bergmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed: The New Historical Fiction explores the renaissance of the American historical novel at the turn of the twenty-first century. The study examines the revision of nineteenth-century historical events in cultural products against the background of recent theoretical trends in American studies. It combines insights of literary studies with scholarship on popular culture. The focus of representation is the long nineteenth century – a period from the early republic to World War I – as a key epoch of the nation-building project of the United States. The study explores the constructedness of historical tradition and the cultural resonance of historical events within the discourse on the contemporary novel and the theory formation surrounding it. At the center of the discussion are the unprecedented literary output and critical as well as popular success of historical fiction in the USA since 1995. An additional postcolonial and transatlantic perspective is provided by the incorporation of texts by British and Australian authors and especially by the inclusion of insights from neo-Victorian studies. The book provides a critical comment on current and topical developments in American literature, culture, and historiography.
Download or read book Such News of the Land written by Thomas S. Edwards and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2001 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of new essays establishes women's voices as a powerful presence in US nature writing.
Download or read book Elizabeth Stoddard the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture written by Lynn Mahoney and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-01-15 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Stoddard and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture traces Stoddard's emergence as a writer in the 1850s, her conflict-ridden relationships with the writers associated with the genteel tradition, and her efforts to negotiate the boundaries of Victorian culture in the United States. While in many ways a critic of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, Stoddard remained in other ways an adherent; her work was not a rejection of bourgeois culture but a reworking of it, which suggests that bourgeois culture was not as monolithic as later critics believed. Recovering the richness and possibility that characterized early Victorian writing, this book examines the range of literary expression which had existed at mid-century, a period that boasts some of American literature's most iconoclastic voices.
Download or read book WLA written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Kitchen Economics written by Thomas Strychacz and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of how nineteenth-century women regional writers represent political economic thought Readers of late nineteenth-century female American authors are familiar with plots, characters, and households that make a virtue of economizing. Scholars often interpret these scenarios in terms of a mythos of parsimony, frequently accompanied by a sort of elegiac republicanism whereby self-sufficiency and autonomy are put to the service of the greater good—a counterworld to the actual economic conditions of the period. In Kitchen Economics: Women’s Regionalist Fiction and Political Economy, Thomas Strychacz takes a new approach to the question of how female regionalist fictions represent “the economic” by situating them within traditions of classical political economic thought. Offering case studies of key works by Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, this study focuses on three complex cultural fables—the island commonwealth, stadialism (or stage theory), and feeding the body politic—which found formal expression in political economic thought, made their way into endless public debates about the economic turmoil of the late nineteenth century, and informed female authors. These works represent counterparts, not counterworlds, to modernity; and their characteristic stance is captured in the complex trope of feminaeconomica. This approach ultimately leads us to reconsider what we mean by the term “economic,” for the emphasis of contemporary neoclassical economics on economic agents given over to infinite wants and complete self-interest has caused the “sufficiency” and “common good” models of female regionalist authors to be misinterpreted and misvalued. These fictions are nowhere more pertinent to modernity than in their alliance with today’s important alternative economic discourses.
Download or read book No More Separate Spheres written by Cathy N. Davidson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-05-10 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No More Separate Spheres! challenges the limitations of thinking about American literature and culture within the narrow rubric of “male public” and “female private” spheres from the founders to the present. With provocative essays by an array of cutting-edge critics with diverse viewpoints, this collection examines the ways that the separate spheres binary has malingered unexamined in feminist criticism, American literary studies, and debates on the public sphere. It exemplifies new ways of analyzing gender, breaks through old paradigms, and offers a primer on feminist thinking for the twenty-first century. Using American literary studies as a way to talk about changing categories of analysis, these essays discuss the work of such major authors as Catharine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Catharine Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, María Ampara Ruiz de Burton, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cynthia Kadohata, Chang Rae-Lee, and Samuel Delany. No More Separate Spheres! shows scholars and students different ways that gender can be approached and incorporated into literary interpretations. Feisty and provocative, it provides a forceful analysis of the limititations of any theory of gender that applies only to women, and urges suspicion of any argument that posits “woman” as a universal or uniform category. By bringing together essays from the influential special issue of American Literature of the same name, a number of classic essays, and several new pieces commissioned for this volume, No More Separate Spheres! will be an ideal teaching tool, providing a key supplementary text in the American literature classroom. Contributors. José F. Aranda, Lauren Berlant, Cathy N. Davidson, Judith Fetterley, Jessamyn Hatcher, Amy Kaplan, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, You-me Park, Marjorie Pryse, Elizabeth Renker, Ryan Schneider, Melissa Solomon, Siobhan Somerville, Gayle Wald , Maurice Wallace
Download or read book Demeter and Persephone written by Tamara Agha-Jaffar and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2002-09-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classical Greek myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone as told in Homer's Hymn to Demeter has been used most often to explain the cycle of the seasons. However, a closer examination will reveal insights on living and dying, loss and reconciliation, and suffering and healing. This work demostrates the continued importance and relevance of the myth of Demeter and Persephone to today's society. The first three chapters provide a summary of the Homeric story and examine the myth from the perspectives of the mother and daughter. The following chapters discuss the symbolism of critical objects, the role of female mentoring, the role of Hades and the meaning of the underworld, the subject of rape, and the masculinist perspective presented by Zeus and Helios, and derive lessons useful for healing and knowledge. The Hymn to Demeter as translated by Helene Foley is included as an appendix in order to provide a basis for the discussion in the text. Notes and a bibliography also follow the text.
