Alexander Cordell

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Morris Young

"Through a blend of personal narrative, cultural and literary analysis, and discussions about teaching, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship shows how people of color use reading and writing to develop and articulate notions of citizenship. Morris Young begins with a narration of his own literacy experiences to illustrate the complicated relationship among literacy, race, and citizenship and to reveal the tensions that exist between competing beliefs and uses of literacy among those who are part of dominant American culture and those who are positioned as minorities."--BOOK JACKET.

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Gary Waller

William Herbert (1580-1630), third earl of Pembroke, and Lady Mary Wroth (1587?-1653?) were first cousins, the nephew and niece of Sir Philip Sidney, whose family was one of remarkable literary and political importance. Herbert was a poet, a voluminous letter writer, and one of the Jacobean court's richest and most powerful courtiers and politicians. Wroth was arguably the most important woman writer of the period; she authored the first Petrarchan poetic sequence, the first prose romance, and one of the first plays in English by a woman. In addition to their connections as cousins and as writers, they were lovers and the parents of two illegitimate children. The Sidney Family Romance is both a "cultural biography" and a symptomatic reading of the sexual and textual relationships of Herbert and Wroth.^ Waller's analysis of their letters and literary works relies on a variety of critical apparatuses - social history, current political and social theories of the Jacobean period, and most notably (feminist) psychoanalytic theory. In both his biographical information and interpretive comments, Waller focuses on subject construction and gender construction of the early modern period, to find that Herbert's poems proceed from his life at court to engage in the gender politics of Petrarchan poetry, while Wroth's work proceeds from her disempowered position to project a desire for an autonomy which would lead to mutuality between the sexes. Waller tries to find ways of analyzing the "inner lives" of his subjects, in the absence of direct evidence, and with a paucity of documentation.^ He examines historical documents, including the writings of the two cousins, and recent historical research, along with contemporary studies of family interactions and gender construction and detailed case histories drawn from nearly a century of clinical and therapeutic studies. The author concludes with a discussion of the crisis of gender in the seventeenth century as a contemporary crisis as well. Family history has long been central to Renaissance studies. The Sidney Family Romance proceeds far beyond any previous works in bringing to bear the very rich and complicated network of ideas, observations, and literary images in the works of Herbert and Wroth.

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Sherry M. Velasco

Isabel de Jesus was a seventeenth-century Carmelite nun who manipulated traditional religious rhetoric in the manner of St. Teresa to express resistance to a misogynistic tradition. Her fascinating autobiography provides a rich source for examining strategies employed by women religious writers. Velasco discusses Isabel's extraordinary ability to articulate the double binds women writers faced, her multiple symbolic uses of nausea and vomiting, and her use of the voice of the Devil as a spokesman for traditional male views. This important in-depth study illustrates how Isabel reshapes symbolic logic in ways that permit her to defend her authority as a writer. Literary scholars will find the discussion of rhetorical strategies and metanarrative discourse engaging as will specialists in religious studies, women's studies, and early modern history.

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Helen Winter Stauffer

As a historian and as a novelist Mari Sandoz (1896{u2013}1966) stands in the front rank of western writers: in the words of John K. Hutchens, "no one in our time wrote better than the late Mari Sandoz did, or with more authority and grace, about as many aspects of the old West." This first full-length biography is particularly concerned to show the relationship between Sandoz's life and experiences and her writing. Drawing heavily on materials in the Mari Sandoz Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln{u2014}correspondence to and from Sandoz, her research notes, and manuscripts{u2014}and on interviews with dozens of Sandoz's friends and acquaintances, the author not only establishes the facts of Sandoz's life but confirms her standing as a writer and historian.