Download or read book Inventing Herself written by Elaine Showalter and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001-03-20 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sure to take its place alongside the literary landmarks of modern feminism, Elaine Showalter's brilliant, provocative work chronicles the roles of feminist intellectuals from the eighteenth century to the present. With sources as diverse as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Scream 2, Inventing Herself is an expansive and timely exploration of women who possess a boundless determination to alter the world by boldly experiencing love, achievement, and fame on a grand scale. These women tried to work, travel, think, love, and even die in ways that were ahead of their time. In doing so, they forged an epic history that each generation of adventurous women has rediscovered. Focusing on paradigmatic figures ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller to Germaine Greer and Susan Sontag, preeminent scholar Elaine Showalter uncovers common themes and patterns of these women's lives across the centuries and discovers the feminist intellectual tradition they embodied. The author brilliantly illuminates the contributions of Eleanor Marx, Zora Neale Hurston, Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Mead, and many more. Showalter, a highly regarded critic known for her provocative and strongly held opinions, has here established a compelling new Who's Who of women's thought. Certain to spark controversy, the omission of such feminist perennials as Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Virginia Woolf will surprise and shock the conventional wisdom. This is not a history of perfect women, but rather of real women, whose mistakes and even tragedies are instructive and inspiring for women today who are still trying to invent themselves.
Download or read book Inventing Herself written by Elaine Showalter and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2002 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inventing Herself is an account of women, from the 18th century to the present, who lived life on a grand scale. Uncovering the lives of feminist intellectuals, Elaine Showalter shows how the intellectual standard for modern feminists has been compromised by the spectre of celebrity.
Download or read book Inventing Victoria written by Tonya Bolden and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a searing historical novel, Tonya Bolden illuminates post-Reconstruction America in an intimate portrait of a determined young woman who dares to seize the opportunity of a lifetime. As a young black woman in 1880s Savannah, Essie's dreams are very much at odds with her reality. Ashamed of her beginnings, but unwilling to accept the path currently available to her, Essie is trapped between the life she has and the life she wants. Until she meets a lady named Dorcas Vashon, the richest and most cultured black woman she's ever encountered. When Dorcas makes Essie an offer she can't refuse, she becomes Victoria. Transformed by a fine wardrobe, a classic education, and the rules of etiquette, Victoria is soon welcomed in the upper echelons of black society in Washington, D. C. But when the life she desires is finally within her grasp, Victoria must decide how much of herself she is truly willing to surrender.
Download or read book Inventing Modern written by John H. Lienhard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-09-18 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern is a word much used, but hard to pin down. In Inventing Modern, John H. Lienhard uses that word to capture the furious rush of newness in the first half of 20th-century America. An unexpected world emerges from under the more familiar Modern. Beyond the airplanes, radios, art deco, skyscrapers, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Buck Rogers, the culture of the open road--Burma Shave, Kerouac, and White Castles--lie driving forces that set this account of Modern apart. One force, says Lienhard, was a new concept of boyhood--the risk-taking, hands-on savage inventor. Driven by an admiration of recklessness, America developed its technological empire with stunning speed. Bringing the airplane to fruition in so short a time, for example, were people such as Katherine Stinson, Lincoln Beachey, Amelia Earhart, and Charles Lindbergh. The rediscovery of mystery powerfully drove Modern as well. X-Rays, quantum mechanics, and relativity theory had followed electricity and radium. Here we read how, with reality seemingly altered, hope seemed limitless. Lienhard blends these forces with his childhood in the brave new world. The result is perceptive, engaging, and filled with surprise. Whether he talks about Alexander Calder (an engineer whose sculptures were exercises in materials science) or that wacky paean to flight, Flying Down to Rio, unexpected detail emerges from every tile of this large mosaic. Inventing Modern is a personal book that displays, rather than defines, an age that ended before most of us were born. It is an engineer's homage to a time before the bomb and our terrible loss of confidence--a time that might yet rise again out of its own postmodern ashes.
Download or read book The Invention of Wings written by Sue Monk Kidd and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection: this special eBook edition of The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd features exclusive content, including Oprah’s personal notes highlighted within the text, and a reading group guide. Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world. Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. Kidd’s sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah’s eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. We follow their remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other’s destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love. As the stories build to a riveting climax, Handful will endure loss and sorrow, finding courage and a sense of self in the process. Sarah will experience crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, and ostracism before leaving Charleston to find her place alongside her fearless younger sister, Angelina, as one of the early pioneers in the abolition and women’s rights movements. Inspired by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke, Kidd goes beyond the record to flesh out the rich interior lives of all of her characters, both real and invented, including Handful’s cunning mother, Charlotte, who courts danger in her search for something better. This exquisitely written novel is a triumph of storytelling that looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved. Please note there is another digital edition available without Oprah’s notes. Go to Oprah.com/bookclub for more OBC 2.0 content
Download or read book Inventing Film Studies written by Lee Grieveson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-24 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inventing Film Studies offers original and provocative insights into the institutional and intellectual foundations of cinema studies. Many scholars have linked the origins of the discipline to late-1960s developments in the academy such as structuralist theory and student protest. Yet this collection reveals the broader material and institutional forces—both inside and outside of the university—that have long shaped the field. Beginning with the first investigations of cinema in the early twentieth century, this volume provides detailed examinations of the varied social, political, and intellectual milieus in which knowledge of cinema has been generated. The contributors explain how multiple instantiations of film study have had a tremendous influence on the methodologies, curricula, modes of publication, and professional organizations that now constitute the university-based discipline. Extending the historical insights into the present, contributors also consider the directions film study might take in changing technological and cultural environments. Inventing Film Studies shows how the study of cinema has developed in relation to a constellation of institutions, technologies, practices, individuals, films, books, government agencies, pedagogies, and theories. Contributors illuminate the connections between early cinema and the social sciences, between film programs and nation-building efforts, and between universities and U.S. avant-garde filmmakers. They analyze the evolution of film studies in relation to the Museum of Modern Art, the American Film Council movement of the 1940s and 1950s, the British Film Institute, influential journals, cinephilia, and technological innovations past and present. Taken together, the essays in this collection reveal the rich history and contemporary vitality of film studies. Contributors: Charles R. Acland, Mark Lynn Anderson, Mark Betz, Zoë Druick, Lee Grieveson, Stephen Groening, Haden Guest, Amelie Hastie, Lynne Joyrich, Laura Mulvey, Dana Polan, D. N. Rodowick, Philip Rosen, Alison Trope, Haidee Wasson, Patricia White, Sharon Willis, Peter Wollen, Michael Zryd
Download or read book Scribbling Women written by Elaine Showalter and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Publisher: A new mother longing to write is judged "hysterical" and confined to her bedroom where she slowly loses herself in horrific fantasy. A young girl stirred by two beings--a handsome young man and an ethereal white heron--is forced to make a choice between them. A love affair quashed by convention ignites during a sudden storm. These tales of remarkable and ordinary lives in nineteenth-century America are told throughout women's voices that call out from the kitchen hearth, the solitary room, the prison cell. Stories by Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton, as well as by others less familiar, reveal a universe of emotions hidden beneath parochial scenes. American writers claimed the short story as their national genre in the nineteenth century, and women writers made it the most important outlet for their particular experiences. A unique selection, with an introduction, notes, selected criticism, and a chronology of the authors' lives and times.
Download or read book Inventing Ireland written by Declan Kiberd and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-05-04 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kiberd - one of Ireland's leading critics and a central figure in the FIELD DAY group with Brian Friel, Seamus Deane and the actor Stephen Rea - argues that the Irish Literary Revival of the 1890-1922 period embodied a spirit and a revolutionary, generous vision of Irishness that is still relevant to post-colonial Ireland. This is the perspective from which he views Irish culture. His history of Irish writing covers Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, O'Casey, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Heaney, Friel and younger writers down to Roddy Doyle.
Download or read book Inventing Beauty written by Teresa Riordan and published by Broadway. This book was released on 2004 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines some of the early inventions and innovations used by women in their quest for beauty including bustles and brassieres, makeup to enhance the eyes and lips, treatments for the body and hair, and ways to flatter the hips and derriere.
Download or read book Reinventing Eve written by Kim Chernin and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 1994-05-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original reinterpretation of Eve and the Garden of Eden that offers women a new sense of feminine power and opportunity.
Download or read book Inventing Elsa Maxwell written by Sam Staggs and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inventing Elsa Maxwell, the first biography of this extraordinary woman, tells the witty story of a life lived out loud. With Inventing Elsa Maxwell, Sam Staggs has crafted a landmark biography. Elsa Maxwell (1881-1963) invented herself–not once, but repeatedly. Built like a bulldog, she ascended from the San Francisco middle class to the heights of society in New York, London, Paris, Venice, and Monte Carlo. Shunning boredom and predictability, Elsa established herself as party-giver extraordinaire in Europe with come-as-you-are parties, treasure hunts (e.g., retrieve a slipper from the foot of a singer at the Casino de Paris), and murder parties that drew the ire of the British parliament. She set New York a-twitter with her soirees at the Waldorf, her costume parties, and her headline-grabbing guest lists of the rich and royal, movie stars, society high and low, and those on the make all mixed together in let-'er-rip gaiety. All the while, Elsa dashed off newspaper columns, made films in Hollywood, wrote bestselling books, and turned up on TV talk shows. She hobnobbed with friends like Noel Coward and Cole Porter. Late in life, she fell in love with Maria Callas, who spurned her and broke Elsa's heart. Her feud with the Duchess of Windsor made headlines for three years in the 1950s. One of the twentieth century's most colorful characters is brought back to life in this biography by the author of All About All About Eve.
Download or read book Inventing a Voice written by Molly Meijer Wertheimer and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2004 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inventing a Voice is a comprehensive work on the lives and communication of twentieth-century first ladies. Using a rhetorical framework, the contributors look at the speaking, writing, media coverage and interaction, and visual rhetoric of American first ladies from Ida Saxton McKinley to Laura Bush. The women's rhetorical devices varied--some practiced a rhetoric without words, while others issued press releases, gave speeches, and met with various constituencies. All used interpersonal or social rhetoric to support their husbands' relationships with world leaders, party officials, boosters, and the public. Featuring an extensive introduction and chapter on the 'First Lady as a Site of 'American Womanhood, '' Wertheimer has gathered a collection that includes the post-White House musings of many first ladies, capturing their reflections on public expectations and perceived restrictions on their communication.
Download or read book Inventing Niagara written by Ginger Strand and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-05-06 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strand reveals the hidden history of America's most iconic natural wonder, Niagara Falls, illuminating what it says about our history, our relationship with the environment, and ourselves.
Download or read book Seeds of Change written by Priscilla Leder and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbara Kingsolver's books have sold millions of copies. The Poisonwood Bible was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and her work is studied in courses ranging from English-as-a-second-language classes to seminars in doctoral programs. Yet, until now, there has been relatively little scholarly analysis of her writings. Seeds of Change: Critical Essays on Barbara Kingsolver, edited by Priscilla V. Leder, is the first collection of essays examining the full range of Kingsolver's literary output. The articles in this new volume provide analysis, context, and commentary on all of Kingsolver's novels, her poetry, her two essay collections, and her full-length nonfiction memoir, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Professor Leder begins Seeds of Change with a brief critical biography that traces Kingsolver's development as a writer. Leder also includes an overview of the scholarship on Kingsolver's oeuvre. Organized by subject matter, the 14 essays in the book are divided into three sections tha deal with recurrent themes in Kingsolver's compositions: identity, social justice, and ecology. The pieces in this ground-breaking volume draw upon contemporary critical approaches—ecocritical, postcolonial, feminist, and disability studies—to extend established lines of inquiry into Kingsolver's writing and to take them in new directions. By comparing Kingsolver with earlier writers such as Joseph Conrad and Henry David Thoreau, the contributors place her canon in literary context and locate her in cultural contexts by revealing how she re-works traditional narratives such as the Western myth. They also address the more controversial aspects of her writings, examining her political advocacy and her relationship to her reader, in addition to exploring her vision of a more just and harmonious world. Fully indexed with a comprehensive works-cited section, Seeds of Change gives scholars and students important insight and analysis which will deepen and broaden their understanding and experience of Barbara Kingsolver's work.
Download or read book Inventing Memory written by Erica Jong and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-08-02 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1997, Inventing Memory is about four generations of remarkable women from a Jewish-American family-their triumphs, tragedies, scandals, and love affairs-as related by Sara Solomon, the youngest of these women. While trying to chronicle their history, the story becomes essentially hers, as she comes to understand the nature of memory, the way all of us both invent and assimilate our ancestors. In learning about the women in her family, Sara discovers how to create her own future.
Download or read book Shadowmaker written by Rosemary Sullivan and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is no doubt Rosemary Sullivan is a biographer of extraordinary talent. Her first biography, By Heart: Elizabeth Smart: A Life was a bestseller and nominated for a Governor General’s Award. Her third biography, The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out, was also a highly acclaimed national bestseller. And her second, Shadow Maker, won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction, the Canadian Authors Association Award for Non-Fiction, the City of Toronto Book Award and the University of British Columbia Medal for Canadian Biography. Now part of the PerennialCanada library, Shadow Maker reveals the many faces of Gwendolyn MacEwen, the magical and mesmerizing Canadian poet who died suddenly at the age of 46.
Download or read book Blood Music written by Jessie Prichard Hunter and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York City is caught in the cold grip of a brutal serial killer who savagely rapes and murders his young, blonde victims. As the death count rises, he sends taunting notes to the newspapers, all with unsettling references to his obsession with classical music. The media is titillated and has dubbed him the "Symphony Slasher." Young, blonde Zelly Wyche has a new baby and a happy life with her dependable electrician husband. But she, too, is petrified by the madness and the unthinkable tragedy of the murders. With time running out, the Slasher's sole survivor teams up with another victim's brother to mount a desperate vigilante manhunt, and a chill runs up Zelly's spine. She is beginning to wonder if the killer could be closer than she thinks. But no—she has to be dead wrong …
