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.

The daughter of medical missionaries, Elaine Neil Orr was born in Nigeria in 1954, in the midst of the national movement that would lead to independence from Great Britain. But as she tells it in her captivating new memoir, Orr did not grow up as a stranger abroad; she was a girl at home--only half American, the other half Nigerian. When she was sent alone to the United States for high school, she didn't realize how much leaving Africa would cost her.

It was only in her forties, in the crisis of kidney failure, that she began to recover her African life. In writing Gods of Noonday...

This intense examination of the writings of Tillie Olsen shows Elaine Neil Orr's deeply sympathetic passion for Olsen's literary world. Orr's objective is not simply to offer literary criticism but to interpret the subjects that inspire and disclose Olsen's spiritual vision.

In Tell me a Riddle, Yonnondio, and, TIllie Olsen presents a world troubled by the problems of sex, race, and class and inhabited by people who are broken, silenced, defeated. Yet her artistic vision of this tragic world reveals Olsen's resounding affirmation of life. Orr's study shows Olsen's work...