Certain to make its way onto college course lists, Showalter’s lucid, comprehensive survey should also find an appreciative...
At last—a New World companion volume to the distinguished feminist scholar’s pioneering A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977).
Showalter (Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, 2005, etc.) begins in the 17th century, spotlighting Anne Bradstreet’s poems and Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative as American literature’s founding documents. Poetry gets a great deal of attention, from 18th-century African-American Phillis Wheatley through Emily Dickinson to Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, mad housewives who trashed domesticity and challenged male poetic hegemony in the 1950s and ’60s. Especially in her coverage of the 19th century, the author casts a wide net and considers the commercially successful novelists denigrated by Nathaniel Hawthorne as “a d—d mob of scribbling women.” She makes no exaggerated artistic claims for Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner, Maria Susanna Cummins and their ilk, but the author cogently elucidates how their popular fiction created an environment in which Harriet Beecher Stowe could write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the first Great American Novel by a woman. Home, husbands and housework were staple subjects, and sources of conflict, but not until the 1890s did New Women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin scandalize critics with frank depictions of female sexuality. As the authors become better known, Showalter’s work necessarily becomes less groundbreaking. It remains intelligent and thorough, however, as she moves from Edith Wharton and Willa Cather at the beginning of the 20th century through the fraught relations between modernism and feminism in the ’20s, women writers both liberated and constrained by political radicalism in the ’30s and the repressive postwar cult of femininity that provoked the feminist explosion of the ’60s and ’70s (as well as such prominent naysayers as Joan Didion and Cynthia Ozick). Chapters on the ’80s and ’90s survey a more diverse, self-confident literature in which Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Jane Smiley, Annie Proulx and others write matter-of-factly as women without feeling limited in any way as to subject matter or style.
Certain to make its way onto college course lists, Showalter’s lucid, comprehensive survey should also find an appreciative audience of serious general readers.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4123-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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