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If you are a member of SSAWW and would like your book listed here, please send the publication information (including a link to the press's page about the book) to Donna Campbell, ssaww.web@gmail.com or campbelld@wsu.edu. If you would like any information included on this page, please send it in the body of your message, not as a .pdf attachment. Book notices are posted in the order in which they were received, with the most recent ones at the top of the page.

Winner of the 2009 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, selected by Marilyn Nelson

Bird Skin Coat is brimming with startling moments of beauty found within a rusty and decayed landscape. With wild lyrical images of ascent and descent—doves and dives, sparrows and slugs, attics and cellars—this collection reflects Sorby’s keen eye for blending images. As they shuttle between the Upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, these poems explore how the radical instability of the world is also the source of its energy.

Driven Out exposes a shocking story of ethnic cleansing in California and the Pacific Northwest when the first Chinese Americans were rounded up and purged from more than three hundred communities by lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians. From 1848 into the twentieth century, Chinatowns burned across the West as Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and fieldworkers, prostitutes and merchants' wives were violently loaded onto railroad cars or steamers, marched out of town, or killed.

But the Chinese fought back—with arms, strikes, and lawsuits and by flatly refusing to leave. When red posters appeared on barns and windows across the United States urging the Chinese to refuse to carry photo identity cards, more than one hundred thousand joined the largest mass civil disobedience to date in the United States. The first Chinese Americans were marched out and starved out. But even facing brutal pogroms, they stood up for their civil rights. This is a story that defines us as a nation and marks our humanity.

AWARDS FOR DRIVEN OUT: THE FORGOTTEN WAR AGAINST CHINESE AMERICANS:

Asian Pacific American Literature Award Best Non-Fiction Award 2007
New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year, 2007;
San Francisco Chronicle Top Books of 2007
Bloomsbury Review “Favorite Books 2007;
Choice Magazine “Outstanding Academic Books 2007”;
Globalist Top Ten Books of 2007
News, Views, Reviews Magazine “Best of 2007: Best Asian Non-Fiction”
Amazon.Com “Ten Most-Wished For Books” Asian American May, 2008
http://www.udel.edu/PR/drivenout/

Unexpected Places recovers the work of early African American authors and editors who have been left off maps drawn by historians and literary critics alike. Individual chapters restore to consideration black literary locations in antebellum St. Louis, antebellum Indiana, Reconstruction-era San Francisco, and several sites tied to the Philadelphia-based ChristianRecorder during and after the Civil War. In conversation with both archival sources and contemporary scholarship, Unexpected Places calls for a large-scale rethinking of the nineteenth-century African American literary landscape. In addition to revisiting such better-known writers as William Wells Brown, Maria Stewart, and Hannah Crafts, Unexpected Places offers the first critical considerations of several important figures including Jennie Carter, Polly Wash, Lizzie Hart, and William Jay Greenly. The book’s discussion of physical locations leads naturally to careful study of how region is tied to genre, authorship, publication circumstances, the black press, domestic and nascent black nationalist ideologies, and black mobility in the nineteenth century.

“Unexpected Places is exactly the kind of book most needed in the field right now. It is a book of rare urgency and authority—a call . . . that emanates from deep within the archive and . . . has to do with the integrity of the field itself.” --John Ernest, author of Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History.

This study reveals in depth the lives and work of five little-known women dramatists: Martha Morton, Madeleine Lucette Ryley, Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland, Beulah Marie Dix, and Rida Johnson Young. Entering playwriting at a time when very few women wrote for the stage, these pioneers achieved thriving careers and entertained theatergoers throughout the United States and Great Britain with wholesome comedies, farces and musicals. Their collective experience as professional dramatists reveals trends of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theatre practices and their accomplishments in a male-dominated profession serve to underscore hitherto unacknowledged contributions to America’s Progressive Era theatre.

"This book …adds an exploration of the area of theatre to our understanding of the opportunities available to the professional woman writer at the time. The greatest strength of the project is in the enormous amount of contemporary material Engle has discovered and drawn on in her accounts. A lucid and engaging study."-- Susan Croft, She Also Wrote Plays: an International Guide to Women Playwrights; “…she achieves her purpose of rescuing the stories of lives well-lived. Celebrating those lives is reason enough to celebrate this book.” Felicia Hardison Londré, Theatre Journal, December 2009.

The ten stories gathered here show Rebecca Harding Davis to be an acute observer of the conflicts and ambiguities of a divided nation and position her as a major transitional writer between romanticism and realism. Capturing the fluctuating cultural environment of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, the stories explore such issues as racial prejudice and slavery, the loneliness and powerlessness of women, and the effects of postwar market capitalism on the working classes. Davis’s characters include soldiers and civilians, men and women, young and old, blacks and whites. Instead of focusing (like many writers of the period) on major conflicts and leaders, Davis takes readers into the intimate battles fought on family farms and backwoods roads, delving into the minds of those who experienced the destruction on both sides of the conflict.

"In this shrewd and refreshing collection, Robin L. Cadwallader and Sharon M. Harris introduce readers to some of the most important short stories by one of the most prolific and respected writers of the nineteenth century. They resituate Davis in literary history and invite us to read her work from a new perspective."
—Lisa A. Long, editor of White Scholars / African American Texts

"Harris provides a more scholarly biography than any of those published so far; she has done copious original research that yields new insights into Walker's life and that makes this work authoritative."—Cynthia J. Davis, University of South Carolina

http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=10160&edition_id=11606&lang=cy

Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860 (eds. Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris; Ashgate, 2009) illustrates the significance of epistolarity as a literary phenomenon intricately interwoven with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural developments. Rejecting the common categorization of letters as primarily private documents, this collection of essays demonstrates the genre's persistent public engagements with changing cultural dynamics of the revolutionary, early republican, and antebellum eras. Sections of the collection treat letters' implication in transatlanticism, authorship, and reform movements as well as the politics and practices of editing letters. The volume is particularly relevant for researchers in U.S. literature and history, as well as women's writing and periodical studies. This dynamic collection offers scholars an exemplary template of new approaches for exploring an understudied yet critically important literary genre.

Women writers featured in essays include: Mercy Otis Warren (Jeffrey H. Richards, Eve Tavor Bannet); Catharine Macauley (Eve Tavor Bannet); Susannah Rowson (Eve Tavor Bannet); Sophia Peabody Hawthorne (Ivonne M. Garcia); Margaret Fuller (Jeffrey Steele); Elizabeth Stoddard (Jennifer Putzi); Margaret Sweat (Jennifer Putzi); Catharine Brown (Theresa Strouth Gaul); Mary Walker (Sharon M. Harris); Fanny Fern (Bonnie Carr O'Neill); Harriet Jacobs (Scott Korb); Rebecca Primus (Linda M. Grasso); and Addie Brown (Linda M. Grasso). Other writers considered are: John Adams (Eve Tavor Bannet); Charles Brockden Brown ( Elizabeth Hewitt); Charles Emerson (Ivonne M. Garcia); John Brown (Zoe Trodd).

In the early twentieth century, three women of color helped shape a new world of ethnographic discovery. Ella Cara Deloria, a Sioux woman from South Dakota, Zora Neale Hurston, a Black woman from Florida, and Jovita González, a Mexican American woman from the Texas borderlands, achieved renown in the fields of folklore studies, anthropology, and ethnolinguistics during the 1920s and 1930s. While all three collaborated with leading male intellectuals in these disciplines to produce innovative ethnographic accounts of their own communities; they also turned away from ethnographic meaning making at key points in their careers, and explored the realm of storytelling through vivid mixed-genre novels centered on the lives of women.

In this book, Cotera offers an intellectual history situated in the borderlands between conventional accounts of anthropology, women's history, and African American, Mexican American and Native American intellectual genealogies. At its core is also a meditation on what it means to draw three women---from disparate though nevertheless interconnected histories of marginalization---into conversation with one another. Can such a conversation reveal a shared history that has been erased due to institutional racism, sexism and simple neglect? Is there a mode of comparative reading that can explore their points of connection even as it remains attentive to their differences? These are the questions at the core of this book, which offers not only a corrective history centered on the lives of women of color intellectuals, but also a methodology for comparative analysis shaped by their visions of the world.

http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/99dnx8yq9780252034749.html

Part literary criticism and part cultural history, Activist Sentiments examines nineteenth-century social, political, and representational literacies and reading practices. P. Gabrielle Foreman reveals how Black women's complex and confrontational commentary--often expressed directly in their journalistic prose and organizational involvement--emerges in their sentimental, and simultaneously political, literary production.
 
"Activist Sentiments reevaluates with a savvy, critical eye the nexus of sex, sentiment, and reform that distinguishes classic nineteenth-century African American women's narratives. Always informative, consistently revealing, and invitingly written, Foreman's book belongs in the company of the major studies in this field by Frances Smith Foster, Hazel Carby, Claudia Tate, and Carla L. Peterson."--William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English, University of North Carolina, and coeditor of The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins.

"With key readings and startling acuity, Foreman's work will be very useful not only to literary scholars but also to historians of the black woman's era."--Rafia Zafar, author of We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870

"In this stimulating and impressive work, Foreman provides astute readings of previously ignored work. This text makes a significant contribution to several areas of scholarship including American literature, history, women's studies, and black studies."--Jennifer DeVere Brody, author of Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture
 

The first naturalized citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bharati Mukherjee (b. 1940), born into a rigid hierarchy as a Bengali Brahmin and raised in the elite of Calcutta society, joined the American masses by choice. This journey from a privileged yet circumscribed life to one of free will and risk supplied the experiences she has turned into literature.

From her first interview, originally published over three decades ago in her native tongue Bengali in the Calcutta journal Desh and appearing here for the first time in English, to an in-depth interview in 2007 granted specifically for this collection, this volume provides a candid look at the woman who has been called the grande dame of diasporic Indian literature.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org/index.htm?books/book%20pages/laffrado%20uncommon.html

Uncommon Women discusses provocative, highly readable, nineteenth-century American texts that complicate notions of self-writing and female agency. This feminist study considers the generic forms, language, and illustrations of a group of complex and often daring texts, including Sarah Kemble Knight’s unconventional travel Journal (1825); Fanny Fern’s controversial newspaper essays (1851–72); Civil War nurse Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863); and cross-dressed soldier S. Emma E. Edmonds’s Nurse and Spy in the Union Army (1865), along with later women’s war reminiscences. The study concludes with a fresh reading of neglected aspects of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the primary Black female autobiographical text of the century, which fundamentally displays what whiteness enabled.

Stowe in Her Own Time
Ed. Susan Belasco 
University of Iowa Press
http://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/2009-spring/belasco-stowe.htm

Stowe in Her Own Time brings together for the first time a range of primary materials about Stowe’s private and public life written by family members, friends, and fellow writers who knew or were influenced by her before and after Uncle Tom’s Cabin catapulted her to fame. Included are periodical articles by Fanny Fern and Charles Dudley Warner; biographical essays by Sarah Josepha Hale and Rose Terry Cooke; letters by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Harriet Jacobs; recollections by Frederick Douglass, Annie Adams Fields, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Charles Beecher; and poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar and John Greenleaf Whittier. An introduction at the beginning of each essay connects it to its historical and cultural context, explanatory notes provide information about people and places, and the book includes fifty illustrations, a detailed introduction, and a chronology of Stowe’s life.  

1-58729-782-5, 978-1-58729-782-3  June 2009

African American Women Writers in New Jersey, 1836-2000
Sibyl E. Moses
Rutgers University Press

Selected as a "New Jersey Notable Book for 1995-2005" by the New Jersey Center for the Book.

Awarded the "2004 Certificate of Commendation" by the American Association for State and Local History.

"An original and laudatory example of scholarship. . . . A valuable tool . . . for the cultural history of New Jersey and U.S. women's history."- The Year's Work in English Studies (vol. 84, 2005)

New in Paperback ISBN 0-8135-4076-3

Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women’s Life Writing, 1840-1890
Katherine Adams
Oxford University Press

978-0-19-533680-1 July 2009

Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century, by Anne E. Boyd (Johns Hopkins UP, 2009). 

Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century
edited by Anne E. Boyd

Wielding the Pen presents a wide spectrum of nineteenth—century American women's writings on the themes of authorship and creativity. These works reflect the fears, desires, and motivations of female authors, as well as the opportunities and obstacles they encountered as professional writers.

Anne E. Boyd includes representative samples from a diverse range of writers. These writings, some of which are reprinted here for the first time, challenge prevailing notions about women and authorship in the nineteenth century and shed light on the relationship between women's lives as writers and their evolving roles in the larger, male—dominated literary community.

Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America's Aesthetics of Alienation
Rochelle L. Johnson
University of Georgia Press

April 2009

Johnson makes the case that in America the aesthetic origins of alienation from nature can be found in the most celebrated cultural productions of the mid-nineteenth century. Using Thomas Cole's landscape painting, Andrew Jackson Downing's theories of landscape architecture, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy as examples of such aesthetic visions, Johnson argues that while on the surface these works exhibited a tremendous passion for nature, each presented nature through the lens of a controlling metaphor - nature as progress, nature as refinement, or nature as human reason - imposing human concerns on perceptions of the physical world. Johnson's study is rooted in discussion of the work of Susan Fenimore Cooper, whose writing displays a relationship to nature unlike that of Cole, Downing, or Emerson. She argues that Cooper and, in his later work Henry David Thoreau, expressed a less popular aesthetics that focused on the physicality of nature. In the nineteenth century as now, Johnson points out, it was possible to respond with enthusiasm to the idea of nature without ever immersing one's self in first-hand observation of natural phenomena. In Johnson's view, both Cooper and Thoreau struggled against this remote enthusiasm, seeking ways to "approach nature on its own terms" and resisting the tendency to turn the natural world into a metaphor for human experience. Johnson argues that this counter aesthetic has relevance for us today. She urges a reconsideration of the degree to which current environmental ideas have their origins in this distancing way of understanding nature despite a professed love for the natural world. (Description from the University of Georgia Press)