What is at stake in the production of experimental texts by lesbian writers? what motivates these writers and characterizes their work? In this work, Elizabeth Meese examines the ways in which the experiences of the text, and the experiences of character, diverge and converge wit the writer's own biography.

What is at stake in the production of experimental texts by lesbian writers? what motivates these writers and characterizes their work? In this work, Elizabeth Meese examines the ways in which the experiences of the text, and the experiences of character, diverge and converge wit the writer's own biography.

Exploring the controversial question of feminist criticism's relationship to recent critical theory, Elizabeth Meese resists the impulse to encompass women's diverse experiences within a single theory. Instead, she attempts to make American critical theory more radically political and American feminist criticism more self-consciously polyvocal and de-centering.

Meese reads writers of the past--Mary Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston--in relation to writers of the present--Marilynne Robinson, Tillie Olsen, Margaret Atwood, and Alice Walker. Demonstrating how theory...