Hope in a jar

Sample

Laura Hapke

Record numbers of women began entering the American labor force in the late 1800s, their experiences composed largely of the drudgery of the factory or the monotony of the sales floor. This feminine mass entry into the workplace sparked thirty-five years of debate, with proponents protesting employers' "moral corruption" of women and detractors arguing for a return to woman's "proper" sphere, the home - evidence of the late-Victorian desire to regulate female sexuality. Authors of fiction were quick to respond: Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, Anzia Yezierska - these and others portrayed working girls in forms as diverse as tenement tales, labor romances, and novels of upward mobility. By joining the period debate about the working girl, her literary imaginers helped shape it. While modern treatments of labor fiction, including those by feminist scholars, have largely ignored these portrayals, Tales of the. Working' Girl does not. Reevaluating both well-known and forgotten texts, this new study by Laura Hapke examines the myriad ways in which the working girl was envisioned by considering the artistic goals and strategies of those who depicted her. Hapke explores to what extent writers acknowledged women's own responses to the controversy, scrutinizes differences in male and female authors' portrayals, and traces the evolution of the working girl as fictional heroine from. The slum melodramas of the 1890s to the strike fiction of the 1910s to the economic ascension novels of the 1920s. Marked by lucid prose and graced by historical photographs and illustrations, Tales of the Working Girl is an important contribution to women's studies, American studies, and labor history.

Sample

Gregory Golley

"As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of "objective observation," modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s. The displacement in science of "positivist" notions of observation by a "realist" model of knowledge provided endless inspiration for Japanese writers. Gregory Golley turns a critical eye to the ideological and ecological incarnations of scientific realism in several modernist works: the photographic obsessions of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Naomi, the disjunctive portraits of the imperial economy in Yokomitsu Riichi's Shanghai, the tender depictions of astrophysical phenomena and human-wildlife relations in the children's stories of Miyazawa Kenji. Attending closely to the political and ethical consequences of this realist turn, this study focuses on the common struggle of science and art to reclaim the invisible as an object of representation and belief." -- Publisher's description.

Sample

Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes

The nearly two hundred rare and dramatic photographs in this work depict life at work in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Work - often arduous, low-paid, and dangerous - defined the region during its period of supercharged development from the 1880s to the 1920s. A final section records work during the depression and war years in the 1930s and 1940s. Complementing the photographs are statements by workers themselves, government analysts, and later observers. The author's essays and commentary on the photographs demonstrate that, from the beginning of U.S. control, wage labor was crucial to integrating the Pacific Northwest into national and international networks of trade, commerce, and industry. The development of lumber, mining, fishing, railroad, and service industries in the New Northwest marked the transformation of the region from an isolated periphery to a functioning component of the world economy and culture. Schwantes also deals with the tension between the supposed freedom and individualism of the frontier West on the one hand and the constraints of wage labor as practiced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the other. This tension gave rise to an often militant trade unionism and political radicalism that was particularly marked in the Northwest.

Sample

Elaine Showalter

"With sources as diverse as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Scream 2, Inventing Herself is an expansive and timely exploration of women who possess a boundless determination to alter the world by boldly experiencing love, achievement, and fame on a grand scale. These women tried to work, travel, think, love, and even die in ways that were ahead of their time. In doing so, they forged an epic history that each generation of adventurous women has rediscovered.". "Focusing on paradigmatic figures ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller to Germaine Greer and Susan Sontag, preeminent scholar Elaine Showalter uncovers common themes and patterns of these women's lives across the centuries and discovers the feminist intellectual tradition they embodied. The author illuminates the contributions of Eleanor Marx, Zora Neale Hurston, Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Mead, and many more."