Ebook: Rereading women: thirty years of exploring our literary traditions

Preface: On hybridity and rereading -- PART I: Finding Atlantis, and growing into feminism. Becoming a feminist together, and apart: notes on collaboration and identity -- Finding Atlantis: thirty years of exploring women's literary traditions in English -- What do feminist critics want? or, A postcard from the volcano -- The education of Henrietta Adams -- A tarantella of theory: Hélène Cixous' and Catherine Clément's newly born woman -- Reflections on a (feminist) discourse of discourse, or Look, Ma, I'm talking! -- PART II: Reading and rereading women's writing. "My name is darkness": the poetry of self-definition -- "A fine, white flying myth": the life/work of Sylvia Plath -- The wayward nun beneath the hill: Emily Dickinson and the mysteries of womanhood -- Jane Eyre and the secrets of furious lovemaking -- The key to happiness: on Frances Hodgson Burnett's The secret garden --"Dare you see a soul at the White Heat?": thoughts on a "Little home-keeping person" -- PART III: Mother rites: maternity, matriarchy, creativity. From patria to matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Risorgimento --"Life's empty pack": notes toward a literary daughteronomy -- Potent Griselda: male modernists and the Great Mother -- Mother rites: maternity, matriarchy, creativity.;"We think back through our mothers if we are women," wrote Virginia Woolf. In this groundbreaking series of essays, Sandra M. Gilbert explores how our literary mothers have influenced us in our writing and in life. She considers the effects of these literary mothers by examining her own history and the work of such luminaries as Charlotte Bront, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath. In the course of the book, she charts her own development as a feminist, demonstrates ways of understanding the dynamics of gender and genre, and traces the redefinitions of maternity reflected in texts by authors such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot. Throughout, Gilbert asks major questions about feminism in the twentieth century: Why and how did its ideas become so necessary to women in the sixties and seventies? What have those feminist concepts come to mean in the new century? And above all, how have our intellectual mothers shaped our thoughts today?