eBooks from the CCC Online Collection
Did you know the CCC online library has over 150,000 eBooks? They're always available, so you can browse through them anytime, and they are full-text searchable, so it's easy to find relevant pages. I've listed some below, but be aware that our collection includes lots and lots of ebooks about women in literature in the United States and beyond.
Women Writers in the United States by
Women Writers in the United States is a celebration of the many forms of work--written and social, tangible and intangible--produced by American women. Davis and West document the variety and volume of women's work in the U.S. in a clear and accessible timeline format. They present informationon the full spectrum of women's writing--including fiction, poetry, biography, political manifestos, essays, advice columns,and cookbooks, alongside a chronology of developments in social and cultural history that are especially pertinent to women's lives. This extensive chronology illustrates thediversity of women who have lived and written in the U.S. and creates a sense of the full trajectory of individual careers. A valuable and rich source of information on women's studies, literature, and history, Women Writers in the United States will enable readers to locate familiar and unfamiliarwomen's texts and to place them in the context out which they emerged.
ISBN: 9780195090536Publication Date: 1996-05-09
Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature by
Geneva Cobb Moore deftly combines literature, history, criticism, and theory in Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature by offering insight into the historical black experience from slavery to freedom as depicted in the literature of nine female writers across several centuries. Moore traces black women writers' creation of feminine and maternal metaphors of power in literature from the colonial era work of Phillis Wheatley to the postmodern work of Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. Through their characters Moore shows how these writers re-create the identity of black women and challenge existing rules shaping their subordinate status and behavior. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and other social science theory, Moore examines the maternal iconography and counter-hegemonic narratives by which these writers responded to oppressive conventions of race, gender, and authority. Moore grounds her account in studies of Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Forten Grimk#65533;, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. All these authors, she contends, wrote against invisibility and powerlessness by developing and cultivating a personal voice and an individual story of vulnerability, nurturing capacity, and agency that confounded prevailing notions of race and gender and called into question moral reform. In these nine writers' construction of feminine images--real and symbolic--Moore finds a shared sense of the historically significant role of black women in the liberation struggle during slavery, the Jim Crow period, and beyond.
ISBN: 9781611177480Publication Date: 2017-03-31
Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America by
Should women concern themselves with reading other than the Bible? Should women attempt to write at all? Did these activities violate the hierarchy of the universe and men's and women's places in it? Colonial American women relied on the same authorities and traditions as did colonial men, but they encountered special difficulties validating themselves in writing. William Scheick explores logonomic conflict in the works of northeastern colonial women, whose writings often register anxiety not typical of their male contemporaries. This study features the poetry of Mary English and Anne Bradstreet, the letter-journals of Esther Edwards Burr and Sarah Prince, the autobiographical prose of Elizabeth Hanson and Elizabeth Ashbridge, and the political verse of Phyllis Wheatley. These works, along with the writings of other colonial women, provide especially noteworthy instances of bifurcations emanating from American colonial women's conflicted confiscation of male authority. Scheick reveals subtle authorial uneasiness and subtextual tensions caused by the attempt to draw legitimacy from male authorities and traditions.
ISBN: 9780813120546Publication Date: 1998-02-26
Women's Poetry by
This guide examines the production and reception of poetry by a range of women writers - predominantly although not exclusively writing in English - from Sappho through Anne Bradstreet and Emily Bronte to Sylvia Plath, Eavan Boland and Susan Howe.Women's Poetry offers a thoroughgoing thematicstudy of key texts, poets and issues, analysing commonalities and differences across diverse writers, periods, and forms. The book is alert, throughout, to the diversity of women's poetry. Close readings of selected texts are combined with a discussion of key theories and critical practices, and students are encouraged to think about women's poetry in the light of debates about race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and regional and national identity. The book opens with a chronologyfollowed by a comprehensive Introduction which outlines various approaches to reading women's poetry. Seven chapters follow, and a Conclusion and section of useful resources close the book.
ISBN: 9780748623051Publication Date: 2007-09-12
Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray by
As a novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet, Judith Sargent Murray candidly and often humorously asserted her opinions about the social and political conditions of women in late eighteenth-century America. As a committed feminist, she urged American women to enter a "new era in femalehistory," yet published her own writings under a man's name in hopes of more widely disseminating her ideas. Murray published poems, essays, and plays regularly in the Massachusetts Magazine. Throughout this early work, Murray addressed various controversial topics, including female education, racial prejudice, equality of the sexes, the value of self-esteem, and theories of universal salvation held byher family. In addition to her literary endeavors Murray was a prolific letter-writer, and revealed in her correspondence, as elsewhere, her unwavering commitment to human rights. Also during this period, Murray produced numerous sketches of celebrated female contemporaries and her major work, TheGleaner. With selections from The Gleaner and Murray's other publications, this latest addition to the Women Writers in English series unearths an important early feminist voice, one that should engage the intellect and imagination of readers both inside and outside the academy.
ISBN: 9780195078831Publication Date: 1995-11-23
Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren by
Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren were radical friends in a revolutionary age. They produced definitive histories of the English Civil War and the American Revolution, attacked the British government and the United States federal constitution, and instigated a debate on women's rightswhich inspired Mary Wollstonecraft, Judith Sargent Murray, and other feminists. Drawing on new research (including recently discovered correspondence) this is the first book to consider Macaulay and Warren in the context of the revolutionary Atlantic. In a series of detailed interdisciplinarystudies, Davies suggests the centrality of both women to transatlantic political cultures between the middle of the eighteenth century and the turn of the nineteenth. The experience of Anglo-American conflict formed Macaulay and Warren's friendship and radically changed their writing lives. Inshowing how it did so, Davies also explains how the revolutionary Atlantic shaped modern ideas of gender difference. Anglo-American separation had a politics of gender which defined Warren and Macaulay's awareness of themselves as women and of which their writing also offered important critiques.Davies's book reveals the political significance of Mercy Otis Warren and Catharine Macaulay to an era when the truths of patriotism, nationhood and empire were never wholly self-evident but were hotly contested.
ISBN: 9780199281107Publication Date: 2006-02-16
Charlotte Temple by
The sentimental novels of the early national period were considered a danger to society and were criticized for the corrupting influence they had on the minds of their mostly young and female audience. They told tales of vice and intrigue that purported to be "based on fact" and alsoadvocated the need for better female education that would prepare young women against sweet-talking seducers. Extremely popular in America after the Revolution and throughout the nineteenth century, Charlotte Temple and The Coquette were two of the most successful novels of the period. Reprintedhere in their entirety, with Introductions by the literary scholar Cathy N. Davidson, they offer the modern student a glimpse at the earliest American popular fiction. Charlotte Temple, the most popular novel in America until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, went through over 200 editions. It tells of a beautiful English girl who at the age of 15 is courted by and runs away with a British lieutenant named Montraville. Susanna Rowson, the daughter of a British naval officer, was one of the most accomplished women of the early national period. Actress, song-writer, novelist, poet, dramatist, and essayist, she was also the founder of one of the most progressive academies for young women of her day. Sheremained best-known, however, for Charlotte Temple, a novel that promised to be "of service to [the]...young and unprotected woman in her first entrance into life." In her Introduction, Cathy Davidson discusses the enormous popularity of the book and the life of Susanna Rowson, which was even more sensational than those of the characters depicted in the novel.
ISBN: 9780195042382Publication Date: 1987-02-19
