Nancy A. Walker

This revision of a widely adopted critical edition presents the 1969 Seyersted text of Kate Chopin's novel along with critical essays that introduce students to The Awakening from the perspectives of feminism, new historicism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction and cultural studies. An additional new essay demonstrates how various approaches can be combined together. The text and essays are complemented by introductions to The Awakening and to the criticism, a glossary of critical terms, and (for the first time) contextual documents.

The Awakening

Critical studies attempting to define and dissect American humor have been published steadily for nearly one hundred years. However, until now, key documents from that history have never been brought together in a single volume for students and scholars. What's So Funny? Humor in American Culture, a collection of 15 essays, examines the meaning of humor and attempts to pinpoint its impact on American culture and society, while providing a historical overview of its progres-sion. Essays from Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner, Joseph Boskin and Joseph Dorinson, William Keough, Roy Blount, Jr., and others trace the development of American humor from the colonial period to the present, focusing on its relationship with ethnicity, gender, violence, and geography. An excellent reader for courses in American studies and American social and cultural history, What's So Funny? explores the traits of the American experience that have given rise to its humor.

Humor in American Culture

What's So Funny?

During and following World War II, women's magazines served as advice manuals, fashion guides, marriage counselors, and catalogs. This thematically arranged collection of selections from Ladies' Home Journal, Woman's Home Companion, McCall's, Redbook, and others provides a resource for understanding how the popular press perceived and attempted to influence women's values, goals, and behavior in the postwar era.

Gender Roles and the Popular Press

Women's Magazines, 1940-1960

In a career that lasted little more than a decade, Kate Chopin became well known for stories set in the Creole and Acadian regions of Louisiana, but her masterwork, The Awakening (1899), told the daring story of a woman who defied social and sexual conventions, eliciting negative reviews that denied Chopin prominence until the middle of the 20th century. This study of her life and work sets Chopin in the context of 19th-century American women writers to show how standards of literary propriety affected the career of a major American writer.

A Literary Life

Kate Chopin

For centuries, women who aspired to write had to enter a largely male literary tradition that offered few, if any, literary forms in which to express their perspectives on lived experience. Since the nineteenth century, however, women writers and readers have been producing "disobedient" counter-narratives that, while clearly making reference to the original texts, overturn their basic assumptions. This book looks at both canonical and non-canonical works, over a variety of fiction and nonfiction genres, that offer counter-readings of familiar Western narratives. Nancy Walker begins by probing women's revisions of two narrative traditions pervasive in Western culture: the biblical story of Adam and Eve, and the traditional fairy tales that have served as paradigms of women's behavior and expectations. She goes on to examine the works of a wide range of writers, from contemporaries Marilynne Robinson, Ursula Le Guin, Anne Sexton, Fay Weldon, Angela Carter, and Margaret Atwood to precursors Caroline Kirkland, Fanny Fern, Mary De Morgan, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Edith Nesbit, and Evelyn Sharp.

Women and Narrative Tradition

The Disobedient Writer

Rachel Maddux

The dream of a green kingdom, a new world, a place to start over - this is the vision that compels the five central characters in this novel to seek a hidden land. The story is at once the age-old tale of utopia and dystopia and the saga of Americans at mid-century, with a history of economic depression, the midwestern dust bowl, and two world wars. First published in 1957, The Green Kingdom was Rachel Maddux's first novel, an ambitious undertaking that had occupied nearly twenty years of her life. Central to the novel is the act of creation - from naming the plants and animals of the kingdom to bearing children. Both Justin Magnus and Erma Herrick discover the wellsprings of their creative energy as they discover the kingdom and, finally, each other in a story that is by turns mystical and realistic, the product of a vivid imagination and keen powers of observation. The Green Kingdom itself is a metaphor for whatever circumstances can make a person feel some control over fate. To live in the Green Kingdom is to inhabit what Maddux calls "the climate of potentiality, " and to read The Green Kingdom is an intense experience in which we imagine our own responses to this land that Maddux so carefully delineates.

The Green Kingdom

Eleanor M. Bender

Bobbie Burk

Women's education and the future are considered in 10 papers/summaries from a 1983 symposium at Stephens College. Four basic themes are addressed: effects of social change on women's lives; the diversity of women students (in age, racial/ethnic background, economic level); structure/content of the college curriculum; and the necessity to make women agents of change. Also presented are summaries of workshops on: women's special needs, societal effect and feminist consciousness, curriculum, and change agents. Titles and authors are: "The Cult of True Womanhood: Past and Present" (Patricia Albjerg Graham); "The Rise of Feminist Consciousness" (Gerda Lerner); "The Effects of Social Change on the Lives of Women: Summary, Session 1" (Nancy Walker); "Education for Self-Empowerment: A Priority for Women of Color" (Patricia Bell Scott); "Special Needs of Women: Summary, Session 2" (Bernice Williamson); "From Fate to Inheritance" (Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich); "The Curriculum: Summary, Session 3" (Jeanine L. Elliott); "Educating Women for Change: How to Grow 'Movers' and 'Shakers'" (Bernice Resnick Sandler); "Women as Agents for Change, Summary, Session 4" (Kathy H. Reese); and "Synthesis Session" (Bobbie Burk). Appended are information on symposium speakers/panelists, a list of participants and planning committee members, and a bibliography. (SW)

The Stephens College Symposium Women's Education, The Future

All of Us are Present

Louis J. Budd

Tom Quirk

John C. Gerber

Jay Martin

Millicent Bell

Stanley Brodwin

George C. Carrington (Jr.)

James Melville Cox

Victor Doyno

Allison R. Ensor

Stephen Gilman

Jan B. Gordon

Hamlin Lewis Hill

William E. Lenz

Fritz Oehlschlaeger

Roy Harvey Pearce

Robert Regan

David R. Sewell

Robert Shulman

Eric Solomon

Jeffrey Steinbrink

Twenty-five essays written by a group of scholars which reassesses the status of Twain's Huckleberry Finn in American literature and in contemporary American culture, reevaluating past scholarship and exploring new directions. A biography of the book's first hundred years (in 1985).

The Boy, His Book, and American Culture : Centennial Essays

One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn

Nancy A. Walker

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