Through narrative and rhetorical strategies that subvert genre and challenge the discourse of race and gender, black South African woman writer Bessie Head creates alternative healing spaces that empower and enoble the marginalized, provide potential for transcendence and self-creation, and render ineffective the power of language to subjugate. This book features new critical material on her life and works and explores the techniques she uses to inscribe an idealistic vision in response to the psychic fragmentation and rootlessness she experienced as an exile.

The traumatized characters...

Edward Taylor (1642-1729) was one of the most influential ministers in Puritan New England. He was also a prolific but unpublished poet. With the discovery of his poetry in 1936 and the publication of a nearly complete volume in 1960, his reputation as the premiere early American poet has grown immensely. His widely anthologized work is taught in most introductory American literature courses and nearly all courses on early American literature. This reference is a convenient guide to his poetry, including a summarization of the current state of scholarship on his...