The glamorous world of big-city geisha is familiar to many readers, but little has been written of the life of hardship and pain led by the hot-springs-resort geisha. Indentured to geisha houses by families in desperate poverty, deprived of freedom and identity, these young women lived in a world of sex for sale, unadorned by the trappings of wealth and celebrity. Sayo Masuda has written the first full-length autobiography of a former hot-springs-resort geisha. Masuda was sent to work as a nursemaid at the age of six and then was sold to a geisha house at the age of twelve. In keeping with...

By providing a meditative overview of the past twenty years in the political study and teaching of literature, Where We're Bound assesses the concrete contributions of the sixties and the kind of changes that needed to come about to institutionalize the activism of this period. Twenty years ago, Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter published their groundbreaking anthology, Politics of Literature. It was the first book, born out of the sixties, to integrate the political insights of the New Left into the practice of literary criticism. Keenly aware of the politics and criticism since the sixties, Davis...