ENH285: Contemporary Women Writers (Williams)

American Women Writers profiles more than 150 women whose works span four centuries & have greatly influenced American writing.

Delving into heretofore untapped sources, the author of the acclaimed masterpiece Virginia Woolf brilliantly interweaves Edith Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age.

During the early years of her career, while struggling to "keep body and soul apart" (as she ruefully put it later), Dorothy Parker wrote more than three hundred poems and verses for a variety of popular magazines and newspapers. Eclectic and exuberant, these 122 once-forgotten gems display Parker's distinctive wit, irony, and precision, as she dissects early-twentieth-century American urban life and gleefully skewers a rich array of targets that range from personal foible to popular culture.

From Anne Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America in the seventeenth century, to Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize in 1993, women writers have woven a rich tapestry of voices across four centuries of American history. Their writings have embraced a marvelous diversity of visions,including those of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Cynthia Ozick, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kate Chopin, Maya Angelou, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, Edith Wharton, Adrienne Rich, Djuna Barnes, and Willa Cather. The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States provides a comprehensive,authoritative, and highly informative survey of these writers and their work.

Shirley Jackson reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the literary genius behind such classics as "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House. Ruth Franklin envisions Jackson as "belonging to the great tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and James" (New York Times Book Review) and demonstrates how her unique contribution to the canon "so uncannily channeled women's nightmares and contradictions that it is "nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era'" (Washington Post).

Talented from the very beginning of her life, Sylvia Plath published her first poem at the age of eight in the 'children's section' of the Boston Herald. She said of her childhood: 'I want to work at putting together the complex mosaic of my childhood; to practice capturing feelings and experiences from the nebulous seething of memory and yank them out into black-and-white on the typewriter.' Plath's poems are considered today to be the most famous by an American female poet of the 20th Century.

This volume explores why and how she is one of America's most treasured and most expansive writers. Original essays discuss Cather's cultural position and her use of radical new literary techniques. Other essays analyze the role of the protagonist in Cather's O Pioneers!, as well as a comparison of One of Ours to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in light of the themes of the waste land and the Holy Grail.