Kate Chopin was an American author of short stories and novels based in Louisiana. She is considered by scholars to have been a forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of Southern or Catholic background, such as Zelda Fitzgerald, and is one of the most frequently read and recognized writers of Louisiana Creole heritage. She is best known today for her 1899 novel The Awakening.
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson is a 1990 work about sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts by scholar Camille Paglia, in which she addresses major artists and writers such as Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Emily Brontë, and Oscar Wilde. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, Paglia argues that the primary conflict in Western culture is between the binary forces of the Apollonian and Dionysian, Apollo being associated with order and symmetry, and Dionysus with chaos, disorder, and nature. The book received critical reviews from numerous feminist scholars, but was praised by numerous literary critics.
Lucas Malet was the pseudonym of Mary St Leger Kingsley, a Victorian novelist. Of her novels, The Wages of Sin (1891) and The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901) were especially popular. Malet scholar Talia Schaffer notes that she was "widely regarded as one of the premier writers of fiction in the English-speaking world" at the height of her career, but her reputation declined by the end of her life and today she is rarely read or studied. At the height of her popularity she was "compared favorably to Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, with sales rivaling Rudyard Kipling." Malet's fin de siecle novels offer "detailed, sensitive investigations of the psychology of masochism, perverse desires, unconventional gender roles, and the body."
King-Kok Cheung is an American literary critic specializing in Asian American literature and is a professor in the department of English at UCLA.
Catherine Obianuju Acholonu was a Nigerian author, researcher and political activist.
Meena Alexander was an Indian American poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander later lived and worked in New York City, where she was a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
The academic discipline of women's writing as a discrete area of literary studies which is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their sex, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men." It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her sex, i.e. her position as a woman within the literary world. Women's writing, as a discrete area of literary studies and practice, is recognized explicitly by the numbers of dedicated journals, organizations, awards, and conferences which focus mainly or exclusively on texts produced by women. Women's writing as an area of study has been developing since the 1970s. The majority of English and American literature programs offer courses on specific aspects of literature by women, and women's writing is generally considered an area of specialization in its own right.
How to Suppress Women's Writing is a book by Joanna Russ, published in 1983. Written in the style of a sarcastic and irreverent guidebook, it explains how women are prevented from producing written works, not given credit when such works are produced, or dismissed or belittled for those contributions which they are acknowledged to have made. Although primarily focusing on texts written in English, the author also includes examples from non-English works and other media, like paintings. Citing authors and critics like Suzy McKee Charnas, Margaret Cavendish, and Vonda McIntyre, Russ aims to describe the systematic social forces that impede widespread recognition of the work of female authors.
Anna Livia was a lesbian feminist author and linguist, well known for her fiction and non-fiction regarding sexuality. From 1999 until shortly before the time of her death she was a member of staff at University of California, Berkeley.
Feminist literature is fiction, nonfiction, drama, or poetry, which supports the feminist goals of defining, establishing, and defending equal civil, political, economic, and social rights for women. It often identifies women's roles as unequal to those of men – particularly as regarding status, privilege, and power – and generally portrays the consequences to women, men, families, communities, and societies as undesirable.
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (TSWL), founded by Germaine Greer in 1982, is devoted to the study of women's literature and women's writing in general. Publishing "articles, notes, research, and reviews of literary, historicist, and theoretical work by established and emerging scholars in the field of women's literature and feminist theory", it has been described as the "longest-running academic journal focusing exclusively on women's writing".
Mary Ellmann (1921–1989) was an American writer and literary critic. Magazines she reviewed for included The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Encounter, The Atlantic Monthly, Commentary, The New Republic, the New Statesman and The American Scholar.
Hortense J. Spillers is an American literary critic, Black Feminist scholar and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of the African diaspora, Spillers is known for her essays on African-American literature, collected in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003, and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, a collection edited by Spillers published by Routledge in 1991.
Eliot Bliss was a Jamaican-born English novelist and poet of Anglo-Irish descent, whose literary friendships encompassed Anna Wickham, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, Romer Wilson and Vita Sackville-West.
Ann Allen Shockley is an American journalist and author, specialising in themes of interracial lesbian love, especially the plight of black lesbians living under what she views as the ‘triple oppression’ of racism, sexism, and homophobia. She has also encouraged libraries to place special emphasis on Afro-American collections.
Maureen Brady is an American writer, editor and educator. She is best known for her novels Ginger's Fire, Folly, and Give Me Your Good Ear. She currently lives and works in New York City and Woodstock, NY.
Language in Modern Literature: Innovation and Experiment is a 1979 book by literary scholar Jacob Korg. In the book, Korg examines the role that linguistic experiment played in literary modernism.
Sarah Chapone, born Sarah Kirkham and often referred to as Mrs Chapone, was an English legal theorist, pamphleteer, and prolific letter writer. She is best known for the treatise The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives, published anonymously in 1735.
Joanne Margaret Braxton is an American author, teacher, and literary critic, an ordained minister, and CEO and President of the Board of the Braxton Institute. She has written about topics including Maya Angelou and the book Black Women Writing Autobiography. Braxton has also edited works such as Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance and a collection of Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetry. She is an emeritus Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings Professor of the Humanities at the College of William & Mary.
Kingsley Widmer (1925–2009) was an American literary critic.