* Revised and expanded edition with a new introduction and postscript, published to coincide with Elaine Showalter’s new hardback, A JURY OF HER PEERS

Knowing that, contrary to society’s expectations, girls often had to be brave, resourceful and bold, that the private lives of girls were colourful and surprising, Alcott wrote a book in…

In a narrative of immense scope and fascination–spanning nearly 400 years and brimming with Showalter’s characteristic wit and incisive opinions–readers are introduced to more than 250 female writers, both famous…

For centuries women have been marginalized and overlooked in American literary history. That injustice is corrected in this entertaining and provocative collection of 350 years of poetry and fiction by…

At the turn of the twentieth century. Central to the novel’s action is the Nebraskan landscape it describes, by turns unyielding and fruitful, bitter and ecstatic.O Pioneers! joins Cather’s My…

Joyce Carol Oates’s prize-winning story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? takes up troubling subjects that continue to occupy her in her fiction. This casebook includes an introduction…

Oates pens a mesmerizing portrayal of Jesse Vogel: his tragic childhood, his pursuit of a career in neurosurgery, and his loss of his daughter to the counterculture.

This study draws upon the insights of social and cultural history, rather than Freudian psychoanalysis, to examine the manner in which hysteria has been conceived by doctors and patients from…