Three Radical Women Writers. Class and Gender in Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Josephine Herbst

1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 153
Author(s):  
C. Stretch ◽  
Nora Ruth Roberts
Author(s):  
JoEllen DeLucia

This chapter examines the relationship between time, feeling, and gender in two foundational texts of the Scottish Enlightenment, the Ossian poems and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. It contends that Macpherson and Smith created a temporal map of emotion that gauged social development from “primitive” to “developed” cultures and offered women writers and Scottish philosophers a new field upon which they could experiment with the relationship between gender and historical progress. Despite their obvious differences, Macpherson and Smith used women’s social status and the feminine values they were thought to impart to their male counterparts as tools for charting, evaluating, and questioning emerging theories of historical change. The ambiguity surrounding feminine sentiments’ placement in these Scottish Enlightenment narratives of historical progress creates the foundation for the following chapters, which trace women writers’ engagement with the theories of feeling and historical progress articulated by these two influential writers.


2021 ◽  
pp. 65-88
Author(s):  
Doris Kadish

This chapter traces Rahv’s forays into and retreats from political radicalism. Letters to Ethel Richman and essays published in the early 1930s (“An Open Letter to Young Writers”, “The Literary Class War”) reveal his deep-seated faith in Marxism and ambivalent commitment to Communism. It describes the founding of Partisan Review, sponsored by the Communist John Reed Club. It considers the magazine’s attention to diversity and social justice and the modern feminist theory of intersectionality, through which interconnected categories of race, class, and gender create overlapping systems of discrimination. The chapter focuses on Partisan Review’s publication of works by proletarian writers including Richard Wright and several women writers: Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Lerner (Olsen), Grace Lumpkin. It explains Rahv’s break with communism after 1934, in response to the Soviet policy of the Popular Front and Stalin’s infamous Moscow Trials. The “Personal Reflections” sections shows how Communism touched my life.


Author(s):  
Hawraa Al-Hassan

W hen Saddam Hussein infamously proclaimed that the word and the bullet came from the same barrel, he created an embattled cultural space which would persist because of, and in spite of, his dominance of Iraqi politics for almost twenty-five years. This book is not an analysis of the status of women in Iraq under Saddam Hussein; nor is it exclusively about Iraqi women writers inside or outside the country, or about constructions of gender and gender identity. Instead the focus of the book is, to use the words of Abir Hamdar, on the ‘ongoing struggle for symbolic power in the Arab world’....


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-237
Author(s):  
Claudia Lindén

The vampire is still primarily a literary figure. The vampires we have seen on TV and cinema in recent years are all based on literary models. The vampire is at the same time a popular cultural icon and a figure that, especially women writers, use to problematize gender, sexuality and power. As a vampire story the Twilight series both produces and problematizes norms in regard to gender, class and ethnici-ty. As the main romantic character in Twilight, Edward Cullen becomes interesting both as a vampire of our time and as a man. In a similar way as in the 19th century novel the terms of relationship are negotiated and like his namesake Edward Rochester, Edward Cullen has to change in important ways for the “happy end-ing” to take place. In spite of a strong interest in sexuality and gender norms in relation to vampires very few studies have focused exclusively on masculinity. This article examines the construction of masculinity in relation to vampirism in the Twilight series. It offers an interpretation of Stephenie Meyer’s novels and the character of Edward as part of a broader field of feminist (re-)uses of the vampire in modern literature with its roots in the literary tradition from Austen and the Brontë-sisters as well as from classic Gothic fiction.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-138
Author(s):  
Roland Walter

This essay analyzes how multiethnic women writers of the Americas draw a map of a critical geography by delineating the interrelated brutalization of human beings and the environment at the colonial-decolonial interface. Its theoretical approach is comparative, interdisciplinary, and intersectional and embedded in Cultural/ Post-Colonial Studies and Ecocriticism with the objective to problematize the issue of identity, ethnicity, and gender in correlation with the land qua place and style of life within a capitalist system. The objective is to reveal and examine the decolonial attitude in texts by multiethnic women writers of the Americas: what is decolonization and how is it translated into the narrative structure, style and theme? 


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. J. Nielsen

In what ways can medieval texts be looked at as fan works? How might the rhetorical tools of fan studies or affect theory aid in further understanding of these texts? Likewise, can we use medieval understandings of literary production to look at modern fan works in order to complicate our contemporary ideas of authorship? Here I consider how Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies (Le Livre de la Cité des Dames) can be read as a reclamatory fan work addressing issues of representation and gender within both the texts it responds to and the larger culture within which the work is situated. Moreover, contextualizing de Pizan's work as fan work can help fan scholars by locating fan studies within a broader literary history. By reframing these earlier works of literature as part of a longer history of women's writing that also involves the works being done today within modalities of fan writing, and by reconsidering fan works as part of a historical continuum of women's writing, we, much as de Pizan herself did, create a theoretical space that historicizes, contextualizes, and indeed valorizes women writers of both fannish and nonfannish works.


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