On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs A Critical Anthology

by Johnson, Merri Lisa Lisa; Mintz, Susannah B. B.

• ISBN13: 9780230113701
• ISBN10: 0230113702
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-09-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Where much of the existing scholarship on Nancy Mairs has approached her essays in the context of disability studies, this book seeks to broaden the conversation through a wider range of critical perspectives and with attention to underrepresented aspects of Mairs's oeuvre. With particular attention to the ways Mairs shapes her essays around a variety of "unspeakables"such as depression, female sexuality and infidelity, mortality and death, or the struggle for faith in a post-modern worldthis collection demonstrates Mairs's provocative combination of bold ethics and subtle aesthetics.

Author Biography

Susannah B.Mintz is an associate professor of English at Skidmore College.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Nancy Mairs on Nancy Mairs * Part 1: The Way In (Two Introductory Statements) * On Difficult Gifts: A Biographical Portrait of Nancy Mairs * On Counterphobic Displays: A Feminist Cripistemology of Unspeakable Embodiment * PART 2: FOUNDATIONAL STATEMENTS * Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Life-writing * “Making up the Stories as We Go Along”: Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability * Transforming the Tale: The Auto/Body/ographies of Nancy Mairs * Dismembering the Heterosexual Imaginary: The Infidelity Narrative in Nancy Mairs’s Remembering the Bone House * PART 3: NEW ESSAYS * On the Rhetoric of Gloom and Joy: In Turbulent Love with the World in A Troubled Guest  * On the Carnivalesque: Unruly Bodies in Nancy Mairs’ “On Touching by Accident" * On Depression Narratives: “Hence, into the dark, we write . . .” * On Nancy’s Husband George: Masculinity, Disability, and Sex after Cancer in Remembering the Bone House and Waist High in the World * On Marriage, Church, and Being a Feminist Catholic Sacraments of the Body in Ordinary Time * On Collaboration: Nancy Mairs’s Ethic of Community * Afterword: Staring at Nancy Mairs