Introduction

  This course traces the history of female authorship in America, with an emphasis on how individual women
 circumvented cultural proscriptions against female reading and writing, and how they manipulated existing
 literary genres in order to make their voices heard.  To this end, we will study, in depth, some of the best
 female writers in America from the seventeenth century to the present.  The course begins with the artfully
 apologetic formal verse of Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley, and concludes with Adrienne Rich's
 brilliant and formally innovative lesbian poetics.  Along the way, we will also read narratives in various
 genres--autobiography, bildungsroman, sentimental romance, local-color fiction, ghost story, and novel--by
 authors ranging from Louisa May Alcott to Sandra Cisneros.  By the end of the semester, students will have
 attained significant knowledge in several areas of literary study: contemporary feminist criticism; American
 literary history; the history of American women's writing; several genres of poetry and narrative; and the
 themes, works, and literary careers of selected major authors. 

 Supplies

 Alcott, Louisa.  Little Women.
 ---.  Louisa May Alcott Unmasked.
 Cisneros, Sandra.  The House on Mango Street.
 Dickinson, Emily.  Complete Poems.
 Gates, Henry Louis, ed.  Black Women's Slave Narratives.
 Hurston, Zora Neale.  Their Eyes Were Watching God.
 Jewett, Sarah Orne.  The Country of the Pointed Firs.
 Kingston, Maxine Hong.  The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.
 Rich, Adrienne.  The Fact of a Doorframe.
 Wharton, Edith.  The House of Mirth.