By adding consideration of age to that of race, gender, and class, this innovative volume seeks to show how growing older affects literary creativity and psychological development and to examine how individual writing careers begin to change in middle age.

By adding consideration of age to that of race, gender, and class, this innovative volume seeks to show how growing older affects literary creativity and psychological development and to examine how individual writing careers begin to change in middle age.

Famous Last Words traces a broad historical transition- from the 1840s to the 1980s- from the more rigid dichotomy of the Victorian novel, in which good women must marry and fallen women die, to the more open alternatives of twentieth-century fiction, which sometimes permit the independent female protagonist to survive and occasionally allow alternative constructions of gender as well as plot.

Each essay treats a narrative- novel, novella, or novel poem- by a single author in light of conventions of closure and of gender in historical context. The contributors recover forgotten...

Twenty contributors consider violence in the works of such acclaimed writers as Adrienne Rich, Harriet Jacobs, Virgnia Woolf, and Audre Lorde, and such too little known authors as Senegal's Mariama Ba and Aminata Sow Fall, Lebanon's Etel Adnan, and the Jamaican Sistren Collective. The cross-cultural range of works encompasses many forms of violence, overt and covert: sexual abuse, the colonial experience, the ravages of cancer, hostility between mothers and daughters, warfare. The contributors look at the variety of responses to violence and address the costs of breaking cultural taboos...

Twenty contributors consider violence in the works of such acclaimed writers as Adrienne Rich, Harriet Jacobs, Virgnia Woolf, and Audre Lorde, and such too little known authors as Senegal's Mariama Ba and Aminata Sow Fall, Lebanon's Etel Adnan, and the Jamaican Sistren Collective. The cross-cultural range of works encompasses many forms of violence, overt and covert: sexual abuse, the colonial experience, the ravages of cancer, hostility between mothers and daughters, warfare. The contributors look at the variety of responses to violence and address the costs of breaking cultural taboos...

In Subject to Negotiation, Elaine Neil Orr proposes negotiation as both a state of consciousness and a significant movement for women writers as well as feminist critics. Challenging the -subversive- model of feminist criticism, she argues for the importance of negotiation for feminist practice within a plurality of critical positions and identities. Without claiming the final word- indeed calling for more words on the subject- Orr sketches an empirical method for a negotiating feminist critcism and then in successive chapters demonstrates the method at work.