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New Books 2011

Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). By: Sara Warner
University of Michigan Press, Triangulations Series

Acts of Gaiety explores the mirthful modes of political performance by LGBT artists, activists, and collectives that have inspired and sustained deadly serious struggles for revolutionary change. The book explores antics such as camp, kitsch, drag, guerrilla theater, zap actions, rallies, manifestos, pageants, and parades alongside more familiar forms of "legitimate theater." Against queer theory's long-suffering romance with mourning and melancholia and a national agenda that urges homosexuals to renounce pleasure if they want to be taken seriously by mainstream society, Acts of Gaiety seeks to reanimate notions of "gaiety" as a political value for LGBT activism.

The book mines the archives of lesbian-feminist activism of the 1960s-70s, highlighting the outrageous gaiety that lay at the center of the social and theatrical performances of the era and uncovering original documents long thought to be lost. Juxtaposing historical figures such as Valerie Solanas and Jill Johnston with more recent performers and activists (including Hothead Paisan, Bitch & Animal, and the Five Lesbian Brothers), Warner shows how reclaiming this largely discarded and disavowed past elucidates possibilities for being and belonging.Acts of Gaiety explores the mutually informing histories of gayness as politics and as joie de vivre, along with the centrality of liveliness to queer performance and protest.

http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do;jsessionid=AA87B184609EE655FBF5701860901832?id=4845841

Histories of the Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice
Ed. Stephanie Foote and Elizabeth Mazzolini. MIT Press.

Garbage, considered both materially and culturally, elicits mixed responses. Our responsibility toward the objects we love and then discard is entangled with our responsibility toward the systems that make those objects. Histories of the Dustheap uses garbage, waste, and refuse to investigate the relationships between various systems--the local and the global, the economic and the ecological, the historical and the contemporary--and shows how this most democratic reality produces identities, social relations, and policies. Histories of the Dustheap offers a range of perspectives on a variety of incarnations of garbage, inviting the reader to consider garbage in a way that goes beyond the common “buy green” discourse that empowers individuals while limiting environmental activism to consumerist practices.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=13032

La Nouvelle-Angleterre: Politique d’une écriture. Récit, genre, lieu, By Cécile Roudeau, Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris Sorbonne, 2012.
New England: Writing as Politics historicizes the tension between region as a territory and region as a deterritorialized site of critique, arguing that nineteenth-century New England women’s writing provides a privileged perspective for exploring this question. . . . The argument therefore takes issue with Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse’s sum on American literary regionalism Writing Out of Place (2003), . . . [M]any of the regionalist women’s writers of New England, I argue, wrote with a keen awareness of the territorial shifts taking place under their feet.

 http://pups.paris-sorbonne.fr/pages/aff_livre.php?Id=981

Treacherous Texts: An Anthology of U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846-1946. Ed. and Introd. Mary Chapman and Angela Mills. Rutgers University Press.

Winner of the 2011 Susan Koppelman Prize for Best Edited Work in Feminist Popular Culture Studies from the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association

"This exciting anthology has no competitors. With an impressive historical range and a great diversity of primary documents and useful reference materials, Treacherous Texts offers an original contribution to scholarship and an important classroom teaching tool."—Ann Ardis, University of Delaware
http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/treacherous_texts.html

The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature. Ed. Dale M. Bauer. Cambridge University Press.

The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature develops and challenges historical, cultural, theoretical, even polemical methods, all of which will advance the future study of American women writers – from Native Americans to postmodern communities, from individual careers to communities of writers and readers. This volume immerses readers in a new dialogue about the range and depth of women's literature in the United States and allows them to trace the ever-evolving shape of the field.

http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item6617701/?site_locale=en_US

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain. Edited by Beth L. Lueck, Brigitte Bailey, and Lucinda L. Damon-Bach. University of New Hampshire Press.

In this volume, fifteen scholars from diverse backgrounds analyze American women writers’ transatlantic exchanges in the nineteenth century. They show how women writers (and often their publications) traveled to create or reinforce professional networks and identities, to escape strictures on women and African Americans, to promote reform, to improve their health, to understand the workings of other nations, and to pursue cultural and aesthetic education.

http://www.upne.com/1611682755.html

Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics. By Alexandra Socarides. Oxford University Press.

In Dickinson Unbound, Alexandra Socarides takes readers on a journey through the actual steps and stages of Emily Dickinson's creative process. Socarides reveals a Dickinsonian poetics starkly different from those regularly narrated by literary history.

http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/AmericanLiterature/19thC/?view=usa&ci=9780199858088#

The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson. Ed. Sharon Dean. University Press of Florida.

"Uncovers the complex, witty, cosmopolitan, imaginative Woolson, who appears more obliquely in her prose and poetry. Peopled by the famous, the infamous, and the unknown, the letters sparkle with intelligence and energy, providing insight into contemporary attitudes that Woolson sometimes shared, sometimes satirized, and sometimes defied, while they reveal an ample sensibility that anticipates today's concerns for the environment, regional and national identity, and global citizenship"--Karen L. Kilcup, author of Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition

http://www.upf.com/book.asp?id=DEANX08

In this rich interdisciplinary study, Hildegard Hoeller argues that nineteenth-century American culture was driven by and deeply occupied with the tension between gift and market exchange. Rooting her analysis in the period’s fiction, she shows how American novelists from Hannah Foster to Frank Norris grappled with the role of the gift based on trust, social bonds, and faith in an increasingly capitalist culture based on self-interest, market transactions, and economic reason. Placing the notion of sacrifice at the center of her discussion, Hoeller taps into the poignant discourse of modes of exchange, revealing central tensions of American fiction and culture.

http://www.upne.com/1611683073.html

Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894. Ed. Kathleen Diffley. University Press of Mississippi

This volume's sixteen essays are intent on illuminating, through Constance Fenimore Woolson’s example, the neglected world of Reconstruction's backwaters in literary developments that were politically charged and genuinely unpredictable. Drawing upon the postcolonial and transnational perspectives of New Southern Studies, as well as the cultural history, intellectual genealogy, and feminist priorities that lend urgency to the portraits of the global South, this collection investigates the mysterious, ravaged territory of a defeated nation as curious northern readers first saw it.

http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1396

Women Writing on Family:Teaching and Publishing
Editors: Carol Smallwood & Suzann Holland, Foreword: Supriya Bhatnagar
Publisher: The Key Publishing House Inc. ISBN: 978-1-926780-13-9
http://www.amazon.com/Women-Writing-Family-Teaching-Publishing/dp/1926780132/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321978679&sr=1

Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing provides guidance and insight for women who write about family. Award winning women writers from all walks of life share their experiences in planning, composing, editing, publishing, teaching, and promoting work in a variety of writing genres. Readers will learn to tackle sensitive family issues and avoid pitfalls in memoir writing, poetry, fiction, and others. Filled with tips, exercises, and anecdotes, this anthology is appropriate for both well-seasoned writers and those just beginning.

Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching edited by Carol Smallwood, Colleen S. Harris and Cynthia Brackett-Vincent (foreword by Molly Peacock) forthcoming from McFarland & Company, $45 softcover, index, (6 x 9),  approx. 300 pp., ISBN 978-0-7864-6392-3 http://www.amazon.com/Women-Poetry-Revising-Publishing-Teaching/dp/0786463929/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315964483&sr=1-6
Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching is the handbook every poet and teacher of poetry should carry. This book brings awareness to not only the art of poetry but also to the voice of women.  It is a tool for both the seasoned poet and for the new poet trying to make their way.  Jenny Sadre-Orafai challenges the poet to enrich their writing life and consider other genres. Others guide us through family and career demands to make time for writing.  We are nurtured to find our writing tribe as Kate Chadbourne suggests and given the tools to promote experimental poetry.  It's about finding voice, digging into life experience, and as Tracy L. Strauss suggests knowing how to "take the truth of tragedy and turn it into an art form."  Doris Lynch instructs how to cast our fishing line into the pool of ideas and begin our poems.  Bonnie J. Robinson prompts us to "write a poem of protest; then, write a poem reconciliation." Women on Poetry is an invitation to introspection and creative self-actualization, inspiring us to be both practitioners and mentors.

Dr. Christine Redman-Waldeyer, founder and editor of Adanna, a journal about women's topics and issues is the author of two books of poetry, Frame by Frame and Gravel, Muse-Pie Press.