EN 221: Women in Literature

The whiteness of mainstream environmentalism often fails to account for the richness and variety of Latinx environmental thought. Building on insights of environmental justice scholarship as well as critical race and ethnic studies, the editors and contributors to Latinx Environmentalisms map the ways Latinx cultural texts integrate environmental concerns with questions of social and political justice.

A New Continent of Liberty examines, against the backdrop of Euro-American literature, how Native American authors have sought to reclaim and redefine distinctive versions of an ideal of self-rule grounded in the natural world. Beginning with the writings of Samson Occom, and extending through a range of fiction and nonfiction works by William Apess, Sarah Winnemucca, Zitkala-Sa, N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich, Geoff Hamilton sketches a movement of gradual but resolute ascent.

This book has a chapter about The Bell Jar and identity formation that covers racial, sexual, and gender dynamics.

Essays on the roles played by women in forming American attitudes about benevolence and poverty relief. These essays address a wide range of subjects, including Frances E. W. Harper's novels. As the editors of Our Sisters' Keepers argue, the vulnerable and marginal positions occupied by many women in the 19th century fostered an empathetic sensitivity in them to the plight of the poor, and their ability to act and write in advocacy of the impoverished offered a form of empowerment not otherwise available to them. The result was the reformulation of the concept of the American individual.

This addition to the Rodopi Press Dialogue Series presents a collection of essays solely dedicated to Woman Hollering Creek (1991), Sandra Cisneros' groundbreaking collection of short fiction stories and sketches. The emerging and veteran scholars who have contributed to this text approach Cisneros' work from varied perspectives, including negotiation of geographic and sociocultural borders, popular and material culture, and gender portrayals.

This book elaborates the social-psychological concept of schema while championing the literary critical practice of close reading to show how literature reflects, promotes, and contests pervasive sociocultural ideas like race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. One chapter covers "The Moths" by Helena Maria Viramontes.

Analyzes Black women's rhetorical strategies in both autobiographical and fictional narratives of slavery.

"Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction" combines genre and cultural theory and offers a cross-ethnic comparative approach to the tradition of the female novel of development and the American coming-of-age narrative. Examines the work of Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Audre Lorde.