Soft Canons: American Women Writers

Contributors

Janet Beer is professor and head of the department of English at the Manchester Metropolitan University . Her publications include Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters (1990) and Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction (1997). She is currently working on a literary life of Edith Wharton and coediting a collection of essays entitled International Episodes: AngloAmerican Exchanges. Alison M. J. Easton is senior lecturer of American literature and women ’s studies at Lancaster University and was codirector of its Centre for Women’s Studies from 1991 to 1994. Her most recent work includes The Making of the Hawthorne Subject (1996) and the new Penguin edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1996). R. J. (Dick) Ellis is professor and head of English at Nottingham Trent University. He has published on Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Alice Walker, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Kathy Acker, among others. The coeditor of Science Fiction Roots and Branches: Contemporary Critical Approaches (1990) and one of the editors of the European Journal of American Culture, he has completed an edition of Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig. M. Giulia Fabi is assistant professor of American literature at the University of Bologna. She has published essays on William Wells Brown, Frank J. Webb, Sutton Griggs, Frances Harper, A. E. Johnson, Henry James, Edward Bellamy, Alice Walker, and African American feminist criticism. The editor of a series of Italian translations of African American novels, she is completing a book on the trope of “passing” in early African American fiction. Janet Floyd is senior lecturer in American studies at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. Her research interests lie in the writing of the domestic in North America, and she is completing a book on the writing of housework in North American emigrant autobiography. She has also edited, with Inga Bryden, a forthcoming collection of essays, Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior in Britain and America. Karen L. Kilcup is associate professor of American literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The recipient of a U.S. national distinguished teacher Contributors award, she has many publications in American women’s writing; her work includes Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology (1997), Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader (1998), Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition (1998), Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon (1999), and Native American Women Writers 1824–1924: An Anthology (2000). In 1995, while at the University of Hull, England, she founded the International Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers Research Group. Susan Manning holds the Grierson Chair of English and American literature at the University of Edinburgh . In addition to her book, The Puritan Provincial Vision (1990), on Scottish and American writers , she has published essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American writers and is particularly interested in the relationship between literature and philosophy. A recent article pursues relationships between Emily Dickinson and Georgia O’Keeffe as American women artists misunderstood by their primarily male first reviewers, an argument she is developing further in a new book, currently entitled Fragments of Union. Stephen Matterson is senior lecturer of American literature and a fellow at Trinity College, University of Dublin. The joint editor of the Journal of the Irish Association of American Studies, he has published work on a variety of American writers, including Berryman and Lowell: The Art of Losing (1988) and the Penguin edition of Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1990). Judie Newman is professor of English , American, and postcolonial literature at the University of Newcastle and a past president of the British Association of American Studies. Her publications include The Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions (1995), Nadine Gordimer (1988), and editions of Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1992, 1998). Susanne Opfermann is professor of American studies at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt. Specializing in gender and ethnic studies, she has published several articles and two books in the field, including Diskurs, Geschlecht, und Literatur: Amerikanische Autorinnen des 19. Jahrhunderts (Discourse, Gender, and Literature: American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century) (1996). Ralph J. Poole teaches American literature and gender studies at the University of Munich. The coeditor of an anthology on serial killers (1997), he is completing a book entitled Cannibal (P)Acts: Literary Anthropophagy as Social Ritual. His publications include essays on queer theory and gender studies, vampirism, Asian American drama, pornography, Kathy Acker, Harold Brodkey, Marianne Moore, and...