This collection of original and classic essays examines the contributions that female authors have made to the short story. The introductory chapter discusses why genre critics have ignored works by women and why feminist scholars have ignored the short story genre. Subsequent chapters discuss early stories by such authors as Lydia Maria Child and Rose Terry Cooke. Others are devoted to the influences (race, class, sexual orientation, education) that have shaped women's short fiction through the years. Women's special stylistic, formal and thematic concerns are also discussed in this study. The final essay addresses the ways our contemporary creative-writing classes are stifling the voices of emerging young female authors. The collection includes an extensive five-part bibliography.
General Editor's Introduction
Acknowledgments
Introduction Julie Brown
Literary Excellence and Social Reform: Lydia Maria Child's Ultraisms for the 1840s Bruce Mills
Fiction as Political Discourse: Rose Terry Cooke's Antisuffrage Short Stories Sherry LeeLinkon
Elizabeth Stoddard: An Examination of Her Work as Pivot Between Exploratory Fiction and the Modern Short Story Timothy Morris
Who Was That Masked Woman? Gender and Form in Louisa May Alcott's Fiction Gail K. Smith Ripe Fruit: Fantastic Elements in the Short Fiction of Ellen Glasgow, Edith Wharton, and Eudora Welty Stephanie Branson
Lady Terrorists: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Ghost Story Barbara Patrick
Representations of Female Authorship in Turn of the Century American Magazine Fiction Ellen Gruber Garvey
Lesbian Magazine Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century Lillian Faderman
Martha Wolfenstein's Isyls of the Grass and rhw Dilemma of Ethnic Self-Representation Barbara Shollar
Fannie Hurst's Short Stories of Working Women--"Oats for the Woman," Sob Sister," and Contemporary Reader Responses: A meditation Susan Koppleman
LostBroders and Blurred Boundaries : Mary Austin as Storyteller Linda K. Karell
Ritual and Renewal: Keres Tradition sin the Short Fiction of Leslie Silko A.Lavonne Brown Ruoff
"A Revolutionary Tale": In Search of African American Women's Short Story Writing Bill Mullen
Society and Self in Alice Walker's inLove and Trouble Dolan Hubbard
Displaced Abjection and States of Grace: Denise Chavez's The Last of theMenu Girls Douglas Anderson Dorthy Parker's Perpetual Motion Ken Johnson
The "Feminine" Short Story in America: Historicizing Epiphanies Mary Burgan
Joyce Carol Oates: Reimagining the Masters, Or, A Woman's Place Is in Her Own Fiction Margaret Rogza
Gender and Genre: The Case of the Novel-in-Stories Margot kelly The Great Ventriloquist Act: Gender and Voice in the Fiction Workshop Julie Brown
Bibliography of primary Sources Susan Koppleman
Bibliography of Secondary Sources Amy Schoenberger
Contributors
Index
