Navigating Women’s Friendships in American Literature and Culture PDF Download

Author: Kristi Branham
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783031080029
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
This volume presents a collection of critical essays that center women’s friendship in women’s literary and artistic production. Analyzing cultural portrayals of women’s friendships in fiction, letters, and film, these essays collectively suggest new models of literary interpretation that do not prioritize heterosexual romance. Instead, this book represents friendships as mature and meaningful relationships that contribute to identity formation and political coalition. Both the supportive and competitive aspects of friendships are shown to be crucial to women’s identities as individuals, political citizens, and artists. Addressing the complexities of how 20th- and 21st-century cultural texts construe women’s friendships as they navigate patriarchal institutions, this collection advances scholarship on friendship beyond men and masculine models.

Author: Kristi Branham
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031080033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

View

Book Description
This volume presents a collection of critical essays that center women’s friendship in women’s literary and artistic production. Analyzing cultural portrayals of women’s friendships in fiction, letters, and film, these essays collectively suggest new models of literary interpretation that do not prioritize heterosexual romance. Instead, this book represents friendships as mature and meaningful relationships that contribute to identity formation and political coalition. Both the supportive and competitive aspects of friendships are shown to be crucial to women’s identities as individuals, political citizens, and artists. Addressing the complexities of how 20th- and 21st-century cultural texts construe women’s friendships as they navigate patriarchal institutions, this collection advances scholarship on friendship beyond men and masculine models.

Author: Marilyn Yalom
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062265512
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

View

Book Description
“Fascinating . . . The Social Sex is a paean to companionship. Share it with a bosom friend.” —NPR From historian and acclaimed feminist author of How the French Invented Love and A History of the Wife comes this rich, multifaceted history of the evolution of female friendship In today’s culture, the bonds of female friendship are taken as a given. But only a few centuries ago, the idea of female friendship was completely unacknowledged, even pooh-poohed. Only men, the reasoning went, had the emotional and intellectual depth to develop and sustain these meaningful relationships. Surveying history, literature, philosophy, religion, and pop culture, acclaimed author and historian Marilyn Yalom and co-author Theresa Donovan Brown demonstrate how women were able to co-opt the public face of friendship throughout the years. Chronicling shifting attitudes toward friendship—both female and male—from the Bible and the Romans to the Enlightenment to the women’s rights movements of the ‘60s up to Sex and the City and Bridesmaids, they reveal how the concept of female friendship has been inextricably linked to the larger social and cultural movements that have defined human history. Armed with Yalom and Brown as our guides, we delve into the fascinating historical episodes and trends that illuminate the story of friendship between women: the literary salon as the original book club, the emergence of female professions and the working girl, the phenomenon of gossip, the advent of women’s sports, and more. Lively, informative, and richly detailed, The Social Sex is a revelatory cultural history.

Author: Janet Doubler Ward
Publisher: Popular Press
ISBN: 9780879726447
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

View

Book Description
Eleven contributed essays discuss a variety of literary texts against a background of the historical and cultural aspects of women's friendships. The listings of works cited and primary works discussed do not adequately substitute for an index. Paper edition (unseen), $15.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Kelly Reames
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350239933
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 435

View

Book Description
The most substantial collection of critical essays on Morrison to appear since her death in mid-2019, this book contains previously unpublished essays which both acknowledge the universal significance of her writing even as they map new directions. Essayists include pre-eminent Morrison scholars, as well as scholars who work in cultural criticism, African American letters, American modernism, and women's writing. The book includes work on Morrison as a public intellectual; work which places Morrison's writing within today's currents of contemporary fiction; work which draws together Morrison's “trilogy” of Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise alongside Dos Passos' USA trilogy; work which links Morrison to such Black Atlantic artists as Lubaina Himid and others as well as work which offers a reading of “influence” that goes both directions between Morrison and Faulkner. Another cluster of essays treats seldom-discussed works by Morrison, including an essay on Morrison as writer of children's books and as speaker for children's education. In addition, a “Teaching Morrison” section is designed to help teachers and critics who teach Morrison in undergraduate classes. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison is wide-ranging, provocative, and satisfying; a fitting tribute to one of the greatest American novelists.

Author: Deborah Tannen
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 1101885815
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 304

View

Book Description
This warm, wise exploration of female friendship from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of You Just Don’t Understand will help women lean into these powerful relationships. A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK • “Celebrates friendship in its frustrations and its rewards and, above all, its wonderful complexity.”—The Atlantic Best friend, old friend, good friend, bff, college roommate, neighbor, workplace confidante: Women’s friendships are a lifeline in times of trouble and a support system for daily life. A friend can be like a sister, daughter, mother, mentor, therapist, or confessor—or she can be all of these at once. She’s seen you at your worst and celebrates you at your best. Figuring out what it means to be friends is, in the end, no less than figuring out how we connect to other people. In this illuminating and validating new book, #1 New York Times bestselling author Deborah Tannen deconstructs the ways women friends talk and how those ways can bring friends closer or pull them apart. From casual chatting to intimate confiding, from talking about problems to telling what you had for dinner, Tannen uncovers the patterns of communication and miscommunication that affect friendships at different points in our lives. She shows how even the best of friends—with the best intentions—can say the wrong thing, and how words can repair the damage done by words. Through Tannen’s signature insight, humor, and ability to present pitch-perfect real-life dialogue, readers will see themselves and their friendships on every page. The book explains • the power of women friends who show empathy, give advice—or just listen • how women use talk to connect to friends—and to subtly compete • how “Fear of Being Left Out” and “Fear of Getting Kicked Out” can haunt women’s friendships • how social media is reshaping communication and relationships Drawing on interviews with eighty women of diverse backgrounds, ranging in age from nine to ninety-seven, You’re the Only One I Can Tell gets to the heart of women’s friendships—how they work or fail, how they help or hurt, and how we can make them better. “At a time when the messages we give and get have so many more ways to be misconstrued and potentially damaging, a book that takes apart our language becomes almost vital to our survival as friends.”—The Washington Post

Author: Remica Bingham-Risher
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819500992
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 153

View

Book Description
In a strange twist of kismet, Remica Bingham-Risher's paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg, Virginia in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is sent to Petersburg in 1941, diagnosed with "water on the brain"—postpartum depression being an ongoing mystery—nine days after birthing her first child. Braiding meticulous archival research with Womanist scholarship and her hallmark lyrical precision, Bingham-Risher's latest collection of poems treads the murky waters of race, lineage, faith, mental health, women's rights, and the violent reckoning that inhabits the discrepancy between lived versus textbook history, asking: What do we inherit when trauma is at the core of our fractured living? Utilizing primary and secondary sources, Bingham-Risher weaves together a richly textured vision of her foremothers' everyday and exceptional living: two very different women at opposite ends of their lives, converging upon the same space and time. The lives these women inhabit and generations they fostered add infinite layers to the fabric of the American tapestry. Room Swept Home serves as a gloriously rendered portrait of all that is held in the line between the private and public, the investigative and generative, the self and those who came before us.

Author: Ivy Schweitzer
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

View

Book Description
Contemporary notions of friendship regularly place it in the private sphere, associated with feminized forms of sympathy and affection. As Ivy Schweitzer explains, however, this perception leads to a misunderstanding of American history. In an exploration of early American literature and culture, Schweitzer uncovers friendships built on a classical model that is both public and political in nature. Schweitzer begins with Aristotle's ideal of "perfect" friendship that positions freely chosen relationships among equals as the highest realization of ethical, social, and political bonds. Evidence in works by John Winthrop, Hannah Foster, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Sedgwick confirms that this classical model shaped early American concepts of friendship and, thus, democracy. Schweitzer argues that recognizing the centrality of friendship as a cultural institution is critical to understanding the rationales for consolidating power among white males in the young nation. She also demonstrates how women, nonelite groups, and minorities have appropriated and redefined the discourse of perfect friendship, making equality its result rather than its requirement. By recovering the public nature of friendship, Schweitzer establishes discourse about affection and affiliation as a central component of American identity and democratic community.

Author: Kayleen Schaefer
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101986123
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

View

Book Description
'Text me when you get home.' After joyful nights out together, female friends say this to one another as a way of cementing their love. It's about safety but, more than that, it's about solidarity. A validation of female friendship unlike any that's ever existed before, Text Me When You Get Home is a mix of historical research, the author's own personal experience, and conversations about friendships with women across the country. Everything Schaefer uncovers reveals that these ties are making us, both as individuals and as society as a whole, stronger than ever before.

Author: Linda W. Rosenzweig
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814774861
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 296

View

Book Description
From nineteenth-century romantic friendships to childhood best friends and idealistic versions of feminist sisterhood, female friendship has been seen as an essential, sustaining influence on women's lives. Women are thought to have a special aptitude for making and keeping friends. But notions of friendship are not constant-and neither are women's experiences of this fundamental form of connection. In Another Self, Linda W. Rosenzweig sheds light on the changing nature of white middle-class American women's relationships during the coming of age of modern America. As the middle-class domesticity of the nineteenth century waned, a new emotional culture arose in the twentieth century and the intensely affectionate bonds between women of earlier decades were supplanted by new priorities: autonomy, careers, participation in an expanding consumer culture, and the expectation of fulfillment and companionship in marriage. An increased emphasis on heterosexual interactions and a growing stigmatization of close same-sex relationships fostered new friendship styles and patterns. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources including diaries, journals, correspondence, and popular periodicals, Rosenzweig uncovers the complex and intricate links between social and cultural developments and women's personal experiences of friendship.