Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism

by Robyn Warhol, Diane Price Herndl

Overview

The 1991 landmark edition of Feminisms presented the most comprehensive collection of American and British feminist literary criticism ever published. By 1997, realizing the need to update the work to remain within the expanded parameters of feminist literary discourse, the volume was revised to include more than two dozen new essays.

Now, at the dawn of a new century of thought and action, it is important once again to revisit the canon of feminist literary criticism and theory and re-establish the measure for representing the latest developments in the field. Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl have joined together once more to provide academics and general readers with a newly revised and indispensable collection of essays representing the range of feminist literary criticism.

Feminisms Redux, presented in a concise format, includes many essays from the second edition that continue to speak to current concerns and also provides readers with new contributions that address work in postcolonial studies, queer theory, and disability studies. As in the earlier volumes, the editors have gathered the full text of original articles and book chapters, with no edited excerpts. The range of essays focuses not only on gender and sex, but also on sexuality, race, class, nationality, and (dis)ability, and the intersections among these categories as they play out in writing by and about women. More than a revision of archetypal work, Feminisms Redux represents the dawning of a new classic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813546209
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	10/09/2009
Pages:	568
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Robyn Warhol-Down is Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio State University. In addition to coediting the prior two editons of Feminisms with Diane Price Herndl, she is editor-in-chief of Women's Worlds: The McGraw-Hill Anthology of Women's Writing, and the author of numerous works, including Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Rutgers University Press).

Diane Price Herndl is a professor of English and director of women's studies at Iowa State University. Along with Robyn Warhol-Down she is the coeditor of the prior two editions of Feminisms, and author of several articles and books, including Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840-1940.

Table of Contents

Canons

• Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship" (1979)
• "Dancing Through the Minefield" (1980)
• "What Has Never Been:An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism" (1981)
• "Aesthetics" from How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983)
• "Caste, Class, and Canon "(1981/87)
• "A Criticism of Our Own: Autonomy and Assimilation in Afro-American and Feminist Literary Theory" (1989)
• "Introduction" from Gender in African Women's Writing: Identity, Sexuality, Difference (1997)

Readings

• "Introduction: On the Politics of Literature" from The Resisting Reader (1978)
• "The Father's Seduction" from The Daughter's Seduction (1982)
• "Constructing the Subject, Deconstructing the Text" (1985)
• "Introduction" and "Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles" from Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985)
• "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion" (1986)
• "Feminist Politics: What's Home Got to Do With It?" (1986)
• "The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism" (1990)
• "Two Girls, Fat and Thin" (2002)
• "Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale" from The Sacred Hoop (1986)
• "La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness" (1987)
• "Me and My Shadow" (1987)
• "The Long Goodbye: Against Personal Testimony, or an Infant Grifter Grows Up" (1992)
• "Feminist and Ethnic Theories in Asian American Literature" (1993)
• "Four Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" (1985, 1999)
• "Introduction" from En-gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (2000)

Bodies

• "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1975)
• "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975)
• "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" (1987)
• "Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions" from Gender Trouble (1999)
• "Reconstructing the Posthuman Feminist Body Twenty Years after Audre Lorde's Cancer Journals" (2002)
• "Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory" (2002)
• "The Cringe: Marriage Plots, Effeminacy, and Feminist Ambivalence" from Having a Good Cry (2003)

Editorial Reviews

"Providing rich material for academic users, this volume is perhaps even more accessible to readers outside the academy than earlier editions were. Recommended."

Choice

"Feminisms Redux reflects a pluralistic approach to feminist literary history. The editors invite readers to remap the nexus of women's literatures and their commentaries on canons."

Feminist Formations

"Feminisms Redux reflects a pluralistic approach to feminist literary history. The editors invite readers to remap the nexus of women's literatures and their commentaries on canons."

From the Publisher