Author: Paula Gallant Eckard
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826264034
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description

Author: Laurie Cassidy
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0814680283
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The idea and ideal of "beauty" has been used to oppress women of different ages, body types, skin color, and physical ability. The theoretical discussion of aesthetics has also been conditioned by these same dynamics of power and oppression. In She Who Imagines, a diverse set of scholars challenges the exclusion and false definitions while constructing capacious ideas that discover beauty in unexpected places. In these essays, the authors draw on a variety of arts media-painting, photography, portraiture, craftwork, poetry, and hip-hop music-thereby joining beauty to truth and, in a richly defining way, to the practice of justice. In a variety of ways all the essays link women's definitions of beauty with experiences of suffering and hence with the yearning for justice. All clearly prize resistance to degradation as an essential element of thought.

Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476673306
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
This literary companion surveys the works of Lee Smith, a Southern author lauded for her autobiographical familiarity with Appalachian settings and characters. Her dialogue captures the distinct voices of mountain people and their perceptions of local and world events, ranging from the Civil War to ecology and modernization. Mental and physical disability and the Southern cultural norm of including the disabled as both family and community members are recurring themes in Smith's writing. An A to Z arrangement of entries incorporates specific titles, and themes such as belonging, healing and death, humor, parenting and religion.

Author: Carmen Rueda Ramos
Publisher: Universitat de València
ISBN: 8437084040
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Este libro analiza la manera con la que Lee Smith ha dado voz a todos los aspectos de su experiencia tanto como mujer-artista que vive en la América contemporánea como nativa de la Appalachia, una región sureña que todavía conserva un fuerte sentimiento de la tradición oral y de vínculos con la comunidad. Smith revisa y altera el lenguaje y los mitos que han condicionado sus búsquedas de la identidad y han silenciado sus voces. Al realizarlo, explora la relación entre el heroísmo femenino y la creatividad de las mujeres como algo distinto a la de los hombres. En su lucha, las heroínas de Smith reflejan el desarrollo personal y artístico de la escritora. La relación conflictiva de sus personajes femeninos con la auto-afirmación y con el mundo de la Appalachia revela los propios sentimientos ambivalentes de Smith hacia el concepto de individualidad y hacia sus raíces culturales.

Author: Laura Tropp
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Through history, interviews, anecdotes, and popular culture, this book examines pregnancy from all angles, covering changing expectations for pregnancy; new definitions of when fatherhood begins; the implications of new, earlier connections to the fetus; and the political, economic, and social consequences to the public. In the 21st century, pregnancy is more than a biological event—it's a cultural phenomenon. A Womb with a View: America's Growing Public Interest in Pregnancy addresses how media influence and changes in society have exposed and commoditized pregnancy like never before, while technology has enabled us to share, record, and preserve all aspects of the pregnancy experience. Each chapter of the book focuses on an aspect of the pregnancy experience, including efforts to peer in and bond with the fetus, the various ways of obtaining advice, the evolving role of expectant fathers, how pregnancy is depicted and treated in popular culture, and branding and marketing to pregnant couples. Interviews with those marketing products and services to pregnant women reveal how pregnancy is now "big business," while real-life stories from pregnant women and images from television and film serve to illustrate our culture's fascination with pregnancy.

Author: Geneva Cobb Moore
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643361015
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 115

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Book Description
The first African American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison is one of the most celebrated women writers in the world. In Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, and Maternal Power in the Novels of Toni Morrison, Geneva Cobb Moore explores how Morrison uses parody and pastiche, semiotics and metaphors, and allegory to portray black life in the United States, teaching untaught history to liberate Americans. In this short and accessible book, originally published as part of Moore's Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature, she covers each of Morrison's novels, from The Bluest Eye to Beloved to God Help the Child. With a new introduction and added coverage of Morrison's final book, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, Bodily Evidence is essential reading for scholars, students, and readers of Morrison's novels.

Author: J. King
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113729227X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
This book explores the way older women are represented in society. Through close readings of novels by major 20th century novelists, compared with the more dominant representations of female ageing to be found in popular culture it suggests that they offer a feminist understanding of the 'invisible' woman sometimes lacking in feminism itself.

Author: Danielle N. Johnson
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611178819
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
A comprehensive treatment of the life and work of this award-winning feminist Appalachian writer Since the release of her first novel, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, in 1968, Lee Smith has published nearly twenty books, including novels, short stories, and memoirs. She has received an O. Henry Award, Sir Walter Raleigh Award, Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction, and a Reader's Digest Award; and her New York Times best-selling novel, The Last Girls, won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. While Smith has garnered academic and critical respect for many of her novels, such as Black Mountain Breakdown, Oral History, and Fair and Tender Ladies, her writing has been viewed by some as lightweight fiction or even "chick lit." In Understanding Lee Smith Danielle N. Johnson offers a comprehensive analysis of Smith's work, including her memoir, Dimestore, treating her as a major Appalachian and feminist voice. Johnson begins with a biographical sketch of Smith's upbringing in Appalachia, her formal education, and her career. She explicates the themes and stylistic qualities that have come to characterize Smith's writing and outlines the criticism of Smith's work, particularly that which focuses on female subjectivity, artistry, religion, history, and place in her fiction. Too often, Johnson argues, Smith's consistent and powerful messages about artistry, gender roles, and historical discourse are missed or undervalued by readers and critics caught up in her quirky characters and dialogue. In Understanding Lee Smith, Johnson offers an analysis of Smith's oeuvre chronologically to study her growth as a writer and to highlight major events in her career and the influence they had on her work, including a major shift in the early 1990s to writing about families, communities, and women living in the mountains. Johnson reveals how Smith has refined her talent for creating nuanced voices and a narrative web of multiple perspectives and evolved into a writer of fine literary fiction worthy of critical study.

Author: Linda Byrd Cook
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786441100
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This book examines Lee Smith's novel-length fiction and its powerful reflection of her personal search for and journey toward spiritual reconciliation. The protagonists of Smith's novels feel estranged from any sense of feminine sacredness as they struggle for a belief system that offers them hope and validation. Chapters describe how Smith has retrieved in her fiction a source of transformative power--the power of the sexual, maternal, feminine divine--in hopes of creating a new image of the total, sacred female whose sexuality, creativity, spirituality, and maternity can reside comfortably in the bodies of everyday heroines.

Author: Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443837091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Since the second half of the twentieth century, there has been a commitment on the part of women writers and scholars to revise and rewrite the history and culture of colonial and post-colonial women. This collection intends to enter a forum of discussion in which the colonial past serves as a point of reference for the analysis of contemporary issues. This volume will examine topics of women’s identities and bodies through literary representations and historical accounts. In other words, the aim is to reconstruct women’s identities through the representations of their bodies in literature and to analyse women’s bodies historically as sites of abuse, discrimination and violence on the one hand, and of knowledge and cultural production on the other. The chapters of this book will contribute to the formation of a new representation of women through history and literature which fights traditional stereotypes in relation to their bodies and identities. Focusing on female bodies as maternal bodies, as repositories of history and memory, as sexual bodies, as healing bodies, as performative of gender, as black bodies, as migrant and hybrid bodies, as the objects of regulation and control, and as victims of sexual exploitation and murder, the different articles contained in this book will examine issues of space, power/knowledge relations, discrimination, the production of knowledge, gender and boundaries to produce new identities for women which contest and respond to the traditional ones. The volume is addressed to a wide readership, both scholars and those interested in investigating the dynamics of the female body, and the social and cultural conceptualizations of our multicultural and multiethnic contemporary societies in relation to it, without forgetting the historical and colonial roots of these new representations.