Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture

2009, Palgrave Macmillan

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This book offers historically-grounded, feminist interventions into American literary history by one of the country's leading scholars in American Studies. Integrating criticism, biography, social history, popular culture, and personal narrative Fishkin explores the poetry, fiction, nonfiction and drama of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century. These charismatic, readable essays range from explorations of feminist humor and chutzpah, to meditations on the personal and the political, to examinations of feminists' challenges to cultural paradigms. Fishkin s lively voice engages readers with the American past and leaves a bold stamp on the literary landscape.

Winner of the Choice Outstanding Title Award

“Shelley Fisher Fishkin's Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture is an engaging demonstration of why "the personal is political." It collects a series of essays, many of which were originally published in other collections or presented at conferences between 1990 and 2004, that explore how writers from the nineteenth through the twentieth century have challenged existing literary and social conventions, thereby paving the way for positive social change …” Studies in the Novel