What if the American literary canon were expanded to consistently represent women writers, who do not always fit easily into genres and periods established on the basis of men's writings? How would the study of American literature benefit from this long-needed revision? This timely collection of essays by fourteen women writers breaks new ground in American literary study. Not content to rediscover and awkwardly "fit" female writers into the "white male" scheme of anthologies and college courses, editors Margaret Dickie and Joyce W. Warren question the current boundaries of literary periods, advocating a revised literary canon. The essays consider a wide range of American women writers, including Mary Rowlandson, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Frances Harper, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell and Adrienne Rich, discussing how the present classification of these writers by periods affects our reading of their work.Beyond the focus of feminist challenges to American literary periodization, this volume also studies issues of a need for literary reforms considering differences in race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. The essays are valuable and informative as individual critical studies of specific writers and their works. Challenging Boundaries presents intelligent, original, well-written, and practical arguments in support of long-awaited changes in American literary scholarship and is a milestone of feminist literary study. (view table of contents)

In an insightful and provocative juxtaposition, Margaret Dickie examines the poetry of three preeminent women writers--Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich--investigating the ways in which each attempts to forge a poetic voice capable of expressing both public concerns and private interests. Although Stein, Bishop, and Rich differ by generation, poetic style, and relationship to audience, all three are twentieth-century lesbian poets who struggle with the revelatory nature of language. All three, argues Dickie, use language to express and to conceal their experiences as they struggle with a censorship that was both culturally sanctioned and self-imposed. Dickie explores how each poet negotiates successfully and variously with the need for secrecy and the desire for openness. By analyzing each poet's work in light of the shared themes of love, war, and place, Dickie makes visible a continuity of interests between these three rarely linked women. In their very diversity of style and strategy, she argues, lies a triumph of the creative imagination, a victory of poetry over polemic. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Thirteen original essays on Gertrude Stein, H. D., Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gwendolyn Brooks demonstrate how these women expand the social, textual, and political boundaries of modernism...read more

Product Description: In Lyric Contingencies Margaret Dickie brings Wallace Stevens and Emily Dick­inson together to explore the ways in which the lyric genre is eccentric to, even disruptive of, the Emersonian tradition that has shaped American literary history...read more

Product Description: Book by Dickie, Margaret