American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays

by Brown,Julie; Brown,Julie

• ISBN13: 9780815335870
• ISBN10: 0815335873
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2000-05-03
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This collection of original and classic essays examines the contributions that female authors have made to the short story. The introductory chapter discusses why genre critics have ignored works by women and why feminist scholars have ignored the short story genre. Subsequent chapters discuss early stories by such authors as Lydia Maria Child and Rose Terry Cooke. Other chapters are devoted to the influences (race, class, sexual orientation, education) that have shaped women's short fiction through the years. Women's special stylistic, formal and thematic concerns are also discussed in this study. The final essay addresses the ways our contemporary creative-writing classes are stifling the voices of emerging young female authors. The collection includes an extensive five-part bibliography.

Table of Contents

General Editor's Introduction	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction	xv
Julie Brown
Literary Excellence and Social Reform: Lydia Maria Child's Ultraisms for the 1840s	3	(14)
Bruce Mills
Fiction as Political Discourse: Rose Terry Cooke's Antisuffrage Short Stories	17	(16)
Sherry Lee Linkon
Elizabeth Stoddard: An Examination of Her Work as Pivot Between Exploratory Fiction and the Modern Short Story	33	(12)
Timothy Morris
Who Was That Masked Woman? Gender and Form in Louisa May Alcott's Confidence Stories	45	(16)
Gail K. Smith
Ripe Fruit: Fantastic Elements in the Short Fiction of Ellen Glasgow, Edith Wharton, and Eudora Welty	61	(12)
Stephanie Branson
Lady Terrorists: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Ghost Story	73	(12)
Barbara Patrick
Representations of Female Authorship in Turn-of-the-Century American Magazine Fiction	85	(14)
Ellen Gruber Garvey
Lesbian Magazine Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century	99	(22)
Lillian Faderman
Martha Wolfenstein's Idyls of the Gass and the Dilemma of Ethnic Self-Representation	121	(16)
Barbara Shollar
Fannie Hurst's Short Stories of Working Women---``Oats for the Woman,'' ``Sob Sister,'' and Contemporary Reader Responses: A Meditation	137	(16)
Susan Koppelman
Lost Borders and Blurred Boundaries: Mary Austin as Storyteller	153	(14)
Linda K. Karell
Ritual and Renewal: Keres Traditions in the Short Fiction of Leslie Silko	167	(24)
A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
``A Revolutionary Tale'': In Search of African American Women's Short Story Writing	191	(18)
Bill Mullen
Society and Self in Alice Walker's In Love and Trouble	209	(26)
Dolan Hubbard
Displaced Abjection and States of Grace: Denise Chavez's The Last of the Menu Girls	235	(16)
Douglas Anderson
Dorothy Parker's Perpetual Motion	251	(16)
Ken Johnson
The ``Feminine'' Short Story in America: Historicizing Epiphanies	267	(14)
Mary Burgan
Joyce Carol Oates: Reimagining the Masters, Or, A Woman's Place Is in Her Own Fiction	281	(14)
Margaret Rozga
Gender and Genre: The Case of the Novel-in-Stories	295	(16)
Margot Kelley
The Great Ventriloquist Act: Gender and Voice in the Fiction Workshop	311	(12)
Julie Brown
Bibliography of Primary Sources	323	(18)
Susan Koppelman
Bibliography of Secondary Sources	341	(12)
Amy Shoenberger
Contributors	353	(6)
Index	359