Haunted by the memories of her powerfully destructive mother, Jamaica Kincaid is a writer out of necessity. Born Elaine Potter Richardson, Kincaid grew up in the West Indies in the shadow of her deeply contemptuous and abusive mother, Annie Drew. Drawing heavily on Kincaid's many remarks on the autobiographical sources of her writings, J. Brooks Bouson investigates the ongoing construction of Kincaid's autobiographical and political identities. She focuses attention on what many critics find so enigmatic and what lies at the heart of Kincaid's fiction and nonfiction work: the "mother...

Brutal Choreographies investigates the novels of Margaret Atwood, focusing on their psychological and political concerns. Drawing on recent feminist and psychoanalytic theory, J. Brooks Bouson examines Atwood's recurring self, family, and romantic dramas, her novelistic subversion of romance ideology, and her critique of gender and power politics. Bouson also considers the oppositional strategies used in Atwood's novels: their punitive plotting and retaliatory rhetoric, their enactments of female revenge fantasies, and their self-conscious manipulation and sabotage of romance and other...

How does physical, emotional, and sexual abuse shape women's perceptions of their bodies and identities? How are women's psyches affected by the sexual, racial, and cultural denigration that occurs when women's bodies are represented as defective, spoiled, damaged, or dirtied? Embodied Shame skillfully explores these questions in the context of recent writings by North American women, contributing to work in shame theory and to feminist analyses of the intersections of theories of the body, affect, emotions, narrative, and trauma. By examining popular contemporary fictional and nonfictional...

Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale won international acclaim when it was first published in 1985; with it, Atwood won Canada's Governor General's Award as well as the Arthur C Clarke Award and was nominated for the Booker Prize. This title collects some the novel's best critics to introduce high school students and undergraduates.

This is a collection of original essays by well known Atwood scholars offering contemporary critical readings and assessments of three well known Atwood texts.

Essay selections offer readers a variety of perspectives on Dickinson through the eyes of some of today's best Dickinson scholars. One essay explores the influences of New England Puritanism, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, and the Civil War on Dickinson's work, while another offers a close reading of several poems to show how experiencing their sound patterns and syntax can inform our understanding of them. Previously published essays discuss the power of her poetry and her complex relations with the natural world and Christian heaven.

This book brings together the research findings of contemporary feminist age studies scholars, shame theorists, and feminist gerontologists in order to unfurl the affective dynamics of gendered ageism. In her analysis of what she calls "embodied shame," J. Brooks Bouson describes older women's shame about the visible signs of aging and the health and appearance of their bodies as they undergo the normal processes of bodily aging. Examining both fictional and nonfiction works by contemporary North American and British women authors, this book offers a sustained analysis of the various ways...