Tracing Arachne's Web

Tracing Arachne's Web

Author: Kristin M. Bloomberg

Publisher: Orange Grove Text Plus

Published: 2009-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781616101077

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"I am particularly impressed with Bloomberg's insights about the ways in which women writers' urge to harness the power of women's myths has to some extent been aroused by historical forces. . . . She explains that women's desire to reinvent their identities requires that women writers take over the narrative tools (such as mythic allusions) provided them by male writers and use those tools to build their own textual 'house.'"--Mary Lowe-Evans, University of West Florida Tracing Arachne's Web examines the use of myth in works by American women novelists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, showing how both classical allusions and ethnic folk myth liberated these writers and enabled them to understand and experience their social and economic worlds. Using the metaphor of Demeter and Persephone as her framework, Kristin Mapel Bloomberg identifies a cycle in women's fiction that moves from the utopian world of Demeter's garden in the late 19th century to the experience of isolated women in the patriarchal underworld of literary modernism. Examining the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Emma D. Kelley-Hawkins, Onoto Watanna (aka Winnifred Eaton), Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Edith Wharton, and Djuna Barnes, she develops a model of women's writing that ties these writers' fascination with the occult and Greek mythology to T. S. Eliot's notion of the "mythical method." Drawing from history and popular culture, she demonstrates how women of color responded to many of the same cultural currents as white writers. She does this, moreover, by analyzing the coded strategies followed by women of color to get their books into print, without collapsing race into gender issues. Invariably provocative, Bloomberg's writing creates a picture of female power in turn-of-the-century American fiction in which women writers turned to alternative spiritual ideologies and occult philosophies to investigate tensions between racism, sexism, and classicism. This book will appeal to scholars in American studies, literary criticism, women's studies, and cultural studies. Kristin M. Mapel Bloomberg, associate professor of English and women's studies at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, holds the Hamline University Chair in the Humanities and is also Director of the Women's Studies Program.


Traces of the Old, Uses of the New

Traces of the Old, Uses of the New

Author: Amy E. Earhart

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2015-11-12

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 0472900684

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Digital Humanities remains a contested, umbrella term covering many types of work in numerous disciplines, including literature, history, linguistics, classics, theater, performance studies, film, media studies, computer science, and information science. In Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies, Amy Earhart stakes a claim for discipline-specific history of digital study as a necessary prelude to true progress in defining Digital Humanities as a shared set of interdisciplinary practices and interests. Traces of the Old, Uses of the New focuses on twenty-five years of developments, including digital editions, digital archives, e-texts, text mining, and visualization, to situate emergent products and processes in relation to historical trends of disciplinary interest in literary study. By reexamining the roil of theoretical debates and applied practices from the last generation of work in juxtaposition with applied digital work of the same period, Earhart also seeks to expose limitations in need of alternative methods—methods that might begin to deliver on the early (but thus far unfulfilled) promise that digitizing texts allows literature scholars to ask and answer questions in new and compelling ways. In mapping the history of digital literary scholarship, Earhart also seeks to chart viable paths to its future, and in doing this work in one discipline, this book aims to inspire similar work in others.


The Lost Girls

The Lost Girls

Author: Andrew D. Radford

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9042022353

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Lost Girls analyses a number of British writers between 1850 and 1930 for whom the myth of Demeter's loss and eventual recovery of her cherished daughter Kore-Persephone, swept off in violent and catastrophic captivity by Dis, God of the Dead, had both huge personal and aesthetic significance. This book, in addition to scrutinising canonical and less well-known texts by male authors such as Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, also focuses on unjustly neglected women writers – Mary Webb and Mary Butts – who utilised occult tropes to relocate themselves culturally, and especially in Butts's case to recover and restore a forgotten legacy, the myth of matriarchal origins. These novelists are placed in relation not only to one another but also to Victorian archaeologists and especially to Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), one of the first women to distinguish herself in the history of British Classical scholarship and whose anthropological approach to the study of early Greek art and religion both influenced – and became transformed by – the literature. Rather than offering a teleological argument that moves lock-step through the decades,The Lost Girls proposes chapters that detail specific engagements with Demeter-Persephone through which to register distinct literary-cultural shifts in uses of the myth and new insights into the work of particular writers.


A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature

A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature

Author: W. Lawrence Hogue

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2020-01-10

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 1785272616

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book reconfigures the history of modern America, showing how multiple and, at times, vulnerable social, economic, literary, and political movements, levels, divisions, and conditions such as the emergent middle class, the labor movement, the Progressive Movement, the socialist and communist parties, the Women’s movements, the NAACP, the Garvey movement, Asian and Native American resistance movements, writers, artists, and intellectuals seized upon social, gender, economic, and racial inequalities and challenged a singularly defined modern America. This book re-represents the modern American novel, accenting the different critical literary voices that come out of the mainstream consumer society but also out of the various unequal social, economic, gender, and political movements and situations. In including racial, gender, sexual, colonial, class, and ethnic others—who reject the rigidity, the repression, the racial and ethnic stereotyping, the external and internal colonialism, the complication/rejection of the past/nature, and the violence of the institutionalized, conformist norm—in a discussion of the modern American novel, it effects a fundamental recasting of the modern Americanist paradigm, one that is de-centered, richer, more complex, and more diverse.


Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers [2 volumes]

Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers [2 volumes]

Author: Yolanda Williams Page

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2007-01-30

Total Pages: 725

ISBN-13: 0313049076

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

African American women writers published extensively during the Harlem Renaissance and have been extraordinarily prolific since the 1970s. This book surveys the world of African American women writers. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on more than 150 novelists, poets, playwrights, short fiction writers, autobiographers, essayists, and influential scholars. The Encyclopedia covers established contemporary authors such as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, along with a range of neglected and emerging figures. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a brief biography, a discussion of major works, a survey of the author's critical reception, and primary and secondary bibliographies. Literature students will value this book for its exploration of African American literature, while social studies students will appreciate its examination of social issues through literature. African American women writers have made an enormous contribution to our culture. Many of these authors wrote during the Harlem Renaissance, a particularly vital time in African American arts and letters, while others have been especially active since the 1970s, an era in which works by African American women are adapted into films and are widely read in book clubs. Literature by African American women is important for its aesthetic qualities, and it also illuminates the social issues which these authors have confronted. This book conveniently surveys the lives and works of African American women writers. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on more than 150 African American women novelists, poets, playwrights, short fiction writers, autobiographers, essayists, and influential scholars. Some of these figures, such as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, are among the most popular authors writing today, while others have been largely neglected or are recently emerging. Each entry provides a biography, a discussion of major works, a survey of the writer's critical reception, and primary and secondary bibliographies. The Encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. Students and general readers will welcome this guide to the rich achievement of African American women. Literature students will value its exploration of the works of these writers, while social studies students will appreciate its examination of the social issues these women confront in their works.


Historical Dictionary of Feminism

Historical Dictionary of Feminism

Author: Janet K. Boles

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 9780810849464

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This Second Edition is an essential resource for librarians, scholars, and students. This succinct handbook includes more than 1,000 entries covering the persons, organizations, campaigns and court cases, goals and achievements, and current and future directions of the feminist movement, 75 percent of which are new and revised from the first edition. This second edition also features a more internationally focused introduction that provides an overview of the history and development of feminism as a movement and as a philosophy. Rounding out this new edition are an expanded chronology, and an updated bibliography that brings attention to many feminist online resources and periodicals, and emphasizes global and third-wave feminism, both new developments in the field since the publication of the first edition. Paying tribute to the struggles of the women, and men, who have worked to change and to improve the living conditions for women in the world, this book promises a comprehensive historical overview for readers of all interest levels.


The Bionic Woman and Feminist Ethics

The Bionic Woman and Feminist Ethics

Author: David Greven

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2020-04-27

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1476674078

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The ABC TV series The Bionic Woman, created by Kenneth Johnson, was a 1970s pop culture phenomenon. Starring Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Sommers, the groundbreaking series follows Jaime's evolution from a young woman vulnerable to an exploitative social order, to a fierce individualist defying a government that sees her as property. Beneath the action-packed surface of Jaime's battles with Fembots, themes such as the chosen family, technophobia, class passing, the cyborg, artificial beings, and a growing racial consciousness receive a sophisticated treatment. This book links the series to precedents such as classical mythology, first-wave feminist literature, and the Hollywood woman's film, to place The Bionic Woman in a tradition of feminist ethics deeply concerned with female autonomy, community, and the rights of nonhuman animals. Seen through the lens of feminist philosophy and gender studies, Jaime's constantly changing disguises, attempts to pass as human, and struggles to accept her new bionic abilities offer provocative engagement with issues of identity. Jaime Sommers is a feminist icon who continues to speak to women and queer audiences, and her struggles and triumphs resonate with a worldwide fanbase that still remains enthralled and represented by The Bionic Woman.