Download or read book Women of Letters the Southern Renaissance and a Literature of Self definition written by William Oliver Brantley and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation provides an intertextual examination of selected nonfiction prose by six women writers of the Southern Renaissance. It situates their self-writing within a context of Southern feminism and the more inclusive discourse of modern American liberalism. Chapter One defines the socio-historical role of the "woman of letters" in the twentieth-century South, while Chapter Two explores the ways in which her work has been marginalized by recent intellectual histories. Chapter Three explains the significance of Lillian Smith's confessional tract, Killers of the Dream (1949; revised in 1961). Smith represents a sharp disruption of a conservative critical agenda that has dominated most appraisals of twentieth-century Southern writing. Smith's ethics, her analyses of women and autobiography, racism and sexism, provide useful points of reference for examining the other writers in this study, each of whom speaks with her own voice of dissent regarding gender norms, problems of race, and patriarchal power structures. The remaining chapters focus on connections between specific texts. Chapter Three defines the achievement of Ellen Glasgow's The Woman Within (1954) and Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings (1984), two autobiographies which center on the woman writer's inner life and which demonstrate the legitimacy of making this life the object of public attention. Chapter Four explores the ethical and political positions of Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time (1976) and Katherine Anne Porter's The Never-Ending Wrong (1977), two remarkably similar memoirs that define the individual in conflict with reactionary forces in modern American history. Chapter Five considers the nexus of gender, region, nation, and race in Zora Neale Hurston's problematic autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942; expanded with previously unpublished chapters in 1984). This chapter explores the tensions within a text that combines both liberal and conservative sentiments before showing how this synthesis becomes even more pronounced in Hurston's subsequent essays. By stressing the significance of a liberal tradition in Southern women's self-writing, this dissertation supplements and challenges prevalent attitudes about the Southern Renaissance and the predominant concerns of its women writers
Download or read book The History of Southern Women s Literature written by Carolyn Perry and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2002-03-01 with total page 724 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of America’s foremost, and most beloved, authors are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a writer as “southern” if her work reflects the region’s grip on her life, Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks have produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and enduring tradition of southern women’s literature. Their comprehensive history—the first of its kind in a relatively young field—extends from the pioneer woman to the career woman, embracing black and white, poor and privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and experiences. The History of Southern Women’s Literature allows readers both to explore individual authors and to follow the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters; the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel; autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and newspaper writing—these and more receive close attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here, and their essays discuss a wealth of women’s issues from four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned social roles—from the belle to the mammy—and real life behind the facade of meeting others’ expectations; poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the influence of Gone with the Wind. The history of southern women’s literature tells, ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an “insidious tradition,” to quote Ellen Glasgow. This teeming volume validates the deep contributions and pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a major achievement in women’s and literary studies.
Download or read book Writing Gender in Women s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance written by Meredith K. Ray and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Italian Renaissance, dozens of early modern writers published collections of private correspondence, using them as vehicles for self-presentation, self-promotion, social critique, and religious dissent. Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance examines the letter collections of women writers, arguing that these works were a studied performance of pervasive ideas about gender as well as genre, a form of self-fashioning that variously reflected, manipulated, and subverted cultural and literary conventions regarding femininity and masculinity. Meredith K. Ray presents letter collections from authors of diverse backgrounds, including a noblewoman, a courtesan, an actress, a nun, and a male writer who composed letters under female pseudonyms. Ray's study includes extensive new archival research and highlights a widespread interest in women's letter collections during the Italian Renaissance that suggests a deep curiosity about the female experience and a surprising openness to women's participation in this kind of literary production.
Download or read book Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir written by Will Brantley and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lillian Smith, Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, and Zora Neale Hurston are distinctly varying and individual writers of the American South whose work is identified with the Southern Literary Renaissance. This intertextual study assesses their autobiographical writings and their intellectual stature as modern women of letters. It is the first to include these writers in the socio-history of modern southern feminism and the first to group them in the discourse of modern American liberalism." "In the confessional tract Killers of the Dream (1949, 1961) Smith's focus upon ethics, racism, and sexism rather than upon conventional southern themes sharply disrupts the ideology of conservative forces in the mainstream of southern literary criticism. In Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir dominant themes from Smith's autobiography are synthesized as other liberal feminine voices in the chorus of southern memoirs examine norms of gender, problems of race, and patriarchal power structures. Ellen Glasgow's The Woman Within (1954) and Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings (1984) center on the woman writer's inner life and demonstrate the legitimacy of making this life the object of public attention. Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time (1976) and Katherine Anne Porter's The Never-Ending Wrong (1977) define the individual in conflict with reactionary forces in modern America. In Dust Tracks on a Road (1942, 1984) Zora Neale Hurston connects the problems of gender, region, nation, and race." "By stressing the significance of a liberal tradition in southern women's autobiographical writings, Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir reconceptualizes the role of the southern woman of letters and her contributions to the literature of the modern South."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Creating Women written by Manuela Scarci and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2009-11 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lee Smith Annie Dillard and the Hollins Group written by Louisiana State University Press and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1999-09 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines the history of Hollins College, which by the 1950s had set itself up as a school with a significant women's writing programme. It examines the influence of the mentors in the 1960s and the writers themselves, such as Lee Smith and Annie Dillard.
Download or read book Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present written by Maria Marotti and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South written by Sharon Monteith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-19 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion maps the dynamic literary landscape of the American South. From pre- and post-Civil War literature to modernist and civil rights fictions and writing by immigrants in the 'global' South of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars explore the region's established and emergent literary traditions. Touching on poetry and song, drama and screenwriting, key figures such as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, and iconic texts such as Gone with the Wind, chapters investigate how issues of class, poverty, sexuality and regional identity have textured Southern writing across generations. The volume's rich contextual approach highlights patterns and connections between writers while offering insight into the development of Southern literary criticism, making this Companion a valuable guide for students and teachers of American literature, American studies and the history of storytelling in America.
Download or read book The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature written by Rinaldina Russell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1997-07-16 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last 20 years, there has been an increasing interest in feminist views of the Italian literary tradition. While feminist theory and methodology have been accepted by the academic community in the U.S., the situation is very different in Italy, where such work has been done largely outside the academy. Among nonspecialists, knowledge of feminist approaches to Italian literature, and even of the existence of Italian women writers, remains scant. This reference work, the first of its kind on Italian literature, is a companion volume for all who wish to investigate Italian literary culture and writings, both by women and by men, in light of feminist theory. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for authors, schools, movements, genres and forms, figures and types, and similar topics related to Italian literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and summarizes feminist thought on the subject. Entries provide brief bibliographies, and the volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography of major studies. This volume covers eight centuries of Italian literature, from the Middle Ages to the present. Included are entries for major canonical male authors, such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as for female writers such as Lucrezia Marinella and Gianna Manzini. These entries discuss how the authors have shaped the image of women in Italian literature and how feminist criticism has responded to their works. Entries are also provided for various schools and movements, such as deconstruction, Marxism, and new historicism; for genres and forms, such as the epic, devotional works, and misogynistic literature; for figures and types, such as the enchantress, the witch, and the shepherdess; and for numerous other topics. Each entry is written by an expert contributor, summarizes the relationship of the topic to feminist thought, and includes a brief bibliography. The volume closes with a selected general bibliography of major studies.
Download or read book A Corresponding Renaissance written by Lisa Kaborycha and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women's vibrant presence in the Italian Renaissance has long been overlooked, with attention focused mainly on the artistic and intellectual achievements of their male counterparts. During this period, however, Italian women excelled especially as writers, and nowhere were they more expressive than in their letters. In A Corresponding Renaissance: Letters Written by Italian Women, 1375-1650 Lisa Kaborycha considers the lives and cultural contributions revealed by these women in their own words, through their correspondence. By turns highly personal, didactic, or devotional, these letters expose the daily realities of women's lives and their feelings, ideas, and reactions to the complex world in which they lived. Through their letters women emerge not merely as bystanders, but as true cultural protagonists in the Italian Renaissance. A Corresponding Renaissance is divided into eight thematic chapters, featuring fifty-five letters that are newly translated into English-many for the first time ever. Each of the letters is annotated and includes a brief biographical introduction and bibliographic references. The women come from all walks of life--saints, poets, courtesans and countesses--and from every geographic area of Italy; chronologically they span the entire Renaissance, with the majority representing the sixteenth century. Approximately one third of the selections are well-known letters, such as those of Catherine of Siena, Veronica Franco, and Isabella d'Este; the rest are lesser known, previously un-translated, or otherwise inaccessible.
Download or read book Women s Writing in Italy 1400 1650 written by Virginia Cox and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2008-06-16 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2009 Best Book Award, Society for the Study of Early Modern WomenWinner, 2008 PROSE Award for Best Book in Language, Literature, and Linguistics. Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers This is the first comprehensive study of the remarkably rich tradition of women’s writing that flourished in Italy between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Virginia Cox documents this tradition and both explains its character and scope and offers a new hypothesis on the reasons for its emergence and decline. Cox combines fresh scholarship with a revisionist argument that overturns existing historical paradigms for the chronology of early modern Italian women’s writing and questions the historiographical commonplace that the tradition was brought to an end by the Counter Reformation. Using a comparative analysis of women's activities as artists, musicians, composers, and actresses, Cox locates women's writing in its broader contexts and considers how gender reflects and reinvents conventional narratives of literary change.
Download or read book A Short History of the Italian Renaissance written by Kenneth R. Bartlett and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning lecturer Kenneth R. Bartlett applies his decades of experience teaching the Italian Renaissance to this beautifully illustrated overview. In his introductory Note to the Reader, Bartlett first explains why he chose Jacob Burckhardt's classic narrative to guide students through the complex history of the Renaissance and then provides his own contemporary interpretation of that narrative. Over seventy color illustrations, genealogies of important Renaissance families, eight maps, a list of popes, a timeline of events, a bibliography, and an index are included.
Download or read book Women Letter Writers in Tudor England written by James Daybell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-26 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England represents one of the most comprehensive study of women's letters and letter-writing during the early modern period to be undertaken, and acts as an important corrective to traditional ways of reading and discussing letters as private, elite, male, and non-political. Based on over 3,000 manuscript letters, it shows that letter-writing was a larger and more socially diversified area of female activity than has been hitherto assumed. In that letters constitute the largest body of extant sixteenth-century women's writing, the book initiates a reassessment of women's education and literacy in the period. As indicators of literacy, letters yield physical evidence of rudimentary writing activity and abilities, document 'higher' forms of female literacy, and highlight women's mastery of formal rhetorical and epistolary conventions. Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England also stresses that letters are unparalleled as intimate and immediate records of family relationships, and as media for personal and self-reflective forms of female expression. Read as documents that inscribe social and gender relations, letters shed light on the complex range of women's personal relationships, as female power and authority fluctuated, negotiated on an individual basis. Furthermore, correspondence highlights the important political roles played by early modern women. Female letter-writers were integral in cultivating and maintaining patronage and kinship networks; they were active as suitors for crown favour, and operated as political intermediaries and patrons in their own right, using letters to elicit influence. Letters thus help to locate differing forms of female power within the family, locality and occasionally on the wider political stage, and offer invaluable primary evidence from which to reconstruct the lives of early modern women.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance written by Anne R. Larsen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a revealing combination of biographies and topical essays that describe the outstanding and often-overlooked contributions of women to the science, politics, and culture of the Renaissance. Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England is the first first comprehensive reference devoted exclusively to the contributions of women to European culture in the period between 1350 and 1700. Focusing principally on early modern women in England, France, and Italy, it offers over 135 biographies of the extraordinary women of those times. Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance provides vivid portraits of well known women such as Catherine of Siena, Joan of Arc, Mary Queen of Scots, and Christine de Pizan. Also included are less familiar but equally important women like Elena Lucrezia Cornaro, the first woman in Europe to earn a doctorate; the renowned Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi; and the acclaimed author of medical textbooks and midwife to a French queen, Louise Boursier. Based on the latest research and enhanced with thematic essays, this groundbreaking work casts our understanding of women's lives and roles in Renaissance history and culture in a provocative new light.
Download or read book Invention of the Renaissance Woman written by Pamela Joseph Benson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Renaissance the nature of womankind was a major topic of debate. Numerous dialogues, defenses, paradoxes, and tributes devoted to sustaining woman's excellence were published, and in them history was rewritten to include the achievements of womankind. Often these texts demonstrate that women are capable of acting with prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice, and thus are capable of being independent of male political and moral authority. Pamela Benson argues that the writers use literary means (genre, characterization, narrator, paradox, plot) to defeat the political challenge posed by female independence and to restrain women within a traditional role. The Invention of the Renaissance Woman is a study of the literary strategies used both to create the notion of the independent woman and to restrain her. Traditionally, the profeminism of most of these texts has not been taken seriously because their playful or extreme styles have been read as a sign that they were nothing but a game. Benson demonstrates that the flamboyant and frequently paradoxical style of these texts is the key to their successful profeminism. She defines the literary and conceptual differences between the Italian and English traditions and argues that two of the greatest literary works of the Renaissance, the Orlando furioso and The Faerie Queene, are major texts in the tradition of defense and praise of women. The Inventions of the Renaissance Women is the first substantial contextual discussion of the majority of the Italian texts and many of the English ones. Benson uses the insights of feminist theory and of cultural studies without subordinating the Renaissance texts to a modern political agenda. Among the authors discussed are Spenser, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Castiglione, Vespasiano da Bisticci, Thomas More, Thomas Elyot, Juan Luis Vives, Richard Hyrde, Jane Anger, and Henry Howard.
