This is another of my summer posts based on a guess about the arrival date of a new book. The Cambridge University Press website lists this book as available from June, so I'm betting that advanced copies have in fact arrived.
In any event, I am pleased to use this space to herald the publication of Dale Bauer's impressive new essay collection The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2012). I know, from my own conversations with editors at Cambridge University Press, that volumes of this variety are meant to be more than just essay collections--they are meant to be authoritative books that map out some scholarly terrain in a comprehensive manner. To scholars and students, books like this are immensely useful, too, because they do just that. This book will be widely read and cited as an authoritative summation of the field of American women's literature.
Here is the book description, pasted in from the press's website:
"The field of American women's writing is one characterized by
innovation: scholars are discovering new authors and works, as well as
new ways of historicizing this literature, rethinking contexts,
categories and juxtapositions. Now, after three decades of scholarly
investigation and innovation, the rich complexity and diversity of
American literature written by women can be seen with a new coherence
and subtlety. Dedicated to this expanding heterogeneity, The Cambridge
History of American Women's Literature develops and challenges
historical, cultural, theoretical, even polemical methods, all of which
will advance the future study of American women writers – from Native
Americans to postmodern communities, from individual careers to
communities of writers and readers. This volume immerses readers in a
new dialogue about the range and depth of women's literature in the
United States and allows them to trace the ever-evolving shape of the
field."
To give a sense of the heft of the collection, here is the table of contents, also pasted in from the CUP website (with some hyperlinks added by me):
Introduction Dale M. Bauer
1. The stories we tell: American Indian women's writing and the persistence of tradition Jodi A. Byrd
2. Women writers and war Jonathan Vincent
3. American women's writing in the Colonial period Kirstin R. Wilcox
4. Religion, sensibility, and sympathy Sandra M. Gustafson
5. Women's writing of the Revolutionary era Jennifer J. Baker
6. Women writers and the early US novel Andy Doolen
7. Women in literary culture during the long nineteenth century Nancy Glazener
8. Moral authority as literary property in mid-century print culture Susan M. Ryan
9. The shape of Catharine Sedgwick's career Melissa J. Homestead
10. Writing, authorship and genius: literary women and modes of literary production Susan S. Williams
11. Nineteenth-century American women's poetry: past and prospects Elizabeth Renker
12. Transatlantic sympathies and nineteenth-century women writing Susan David Bernstein
13. Nineteenth-century African American women writers John Ernest
14. Local knowledge and regional women's writing Stephanie Foote
15. Women and children first: female writers of American children's literature Carol Singley
16. US suffrage literature Mary Chapman
17. American women playwrights Brenda Murphy
18. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century transitions: women on the edge of tomorrow Stephanie Smith
19. Women's writing and naturalism: accidents and agency Jennifer Travis
20. The geography of ladyhood: racializing the novel of manners Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
21. Self-made women: novelists of the 1920s Jean M. Lutes
22. Recovering the legacy of Zara Wright and the twentieth-century black woman writer Rynetta Davis
23. Jewish American women writers Hana Wirth-Nesher
24. Women on the breadlines John Marsh
25. Modern domestic realism in America, 1950–1970 Gordon Hutner
26. Lyric, gender and subjectivity in modern and contemporary poetry Jennifer Ashton
27. Contemporary American women's writing: women and violence Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson
28. Asian-American women's literature and the promise of committed art Leslie Bow
29. Straight sex, queer text: American women novelists Lynda Zwinger
30. Latina writers and the usable past Kimberly O'Neill
31. Where is she? Women/access/rhetoric Patricia Bizzell
32. Reading women in America Susan M. Griffin
Editing such a collection is a major undertaking, and this is a volume that will clearly make a major impact. Congratulations, Dale!
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