Radicals, Volume 1: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama: Audacious Writings by American Women, 1830-1930
Description
Kate Chopin on pot smoking. Pauline Hopkins on alchemy and the undead. Sui Sin Far on cross-dressing. Emma Lazarus and Angelina Weld Grimké on lesbian longing. Julia Ward Howe on intersexuality. Perhaps the first of its kind,
Radicals is a two-volume collection of writings by American women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special attention paid to the voices of Black, Indigenous, and Asian American women.
In Volume 1: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, selections span from early works like Sarah Louise Forten’s anti-slavery poem “The Grave of the Slave” (1831) and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855), a novel about her struggle to break into the male-dominated field of journalism, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s revenge fantasy, “When I Was a Witch” (1910) and Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poem on the fraught nature of African American motherhood, “Maternity” (1922). In between, readers will discover many vibrant and challenging lesser-known texts that are rarely collected today. Some, indeed, have been out of print for more than a century.
Unique among anthologies of American literature, Radicals undoes such silences by collecting the underrepresented, the uncategorizable, the unbowed—powerful writings by American women of genius and audacity who looked toward, and wrote toward, what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called “a lifted world.”
Praise for Radicals, Volume 1: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama: Audacious Writings by American Women, 1830-1930
“Scholars Stabel and Turpin bring together a successfully corrective anthology from a diverse group of writers from both in and outside the canon. The editors notably highlight Black authors; short stories from Chinese American and Native American writers; and protoqueer writing. . . . the volume succeeds in its mission to “re-present—or in some cases present for the first time—the many beautiful, lesser-known examples of early radical womanhood in America.” This compendium is a wonderful alternative view of the period.”—Publishers Weekly
“This anthology offers up writing from women at a time when women’s literacy was largely the privilege of wealthy and upper-middle-class white women, and women were expected to write demure, well-mannered things. These writings are not that. They represent a hundred years of women writing their way into public discourse, giving voice to the complexities of their inner lives, their desires, their sentiments about the constraints of womanhood, the political climate, the strictures of class, and their places in their families, communities, and the world beyond.”—Roxane Gay, author, Bad Feminist: Essays
“This two-volume anthology . . . represents a significant contribution to the teaching of both American literary history and women’s studies. . . . Radicals successfully reaffirms the power of primary texts over mere summaries of women’s history. . . . its editors remind us that ‘simply publishing one’s words was an assertion of autonomy and self-hood’ between 1830–1930—as indeed it still is. These two books provide readers with sustaining stories and enduring visions that will continue to inspire.”—Legacy