Silences

First, published in 1978, Tulle Olsen's 'Silences' revolutionised literary studies and inspired an explosion of new creative voices. By exploring the social and economic conditions that make creativity possible, Olsen sheds new light into the gaps in the literary landscape and the canon. She reveals that working-class people, people of colour, and all women have in fact always written -- though their work has been officially ignored -- and she examines the forces they struggled against in order to create, forces that led in many cases to premature silence. With fascinating testimony from authors' diaries and letters, Olsen takes us inside the artistic process, examining the effects of poverty, family duties (especially motherhood), political and religious censorship, and rigid literary norms on writers ranging from Thomas Hardy and Herman Melville to Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath. For those disadvantaged by gender, class, or race, these obstacles loom even larger. In particular, Olsen makes the case that women writers have faced crushing odds, their talents underestimated, their achievements ignored, the themes of their writing scorned, their very attempt to write condemned as a breach of family duty -- and of feminine nature. And yet, as she shows, they have written. This special 25th anniversary edition includes an introduction tracing the impact of Silences on women's studies, women's writing, and women's publishing. It also provides a key document of Olsen's work: the famous reading lists that she assembled from her years of research in public libraries.<

ISBN 1558614419   Pages 352 ISBN13 9781558614413 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Feminist Press at The City University of New York   Weight (grammes) 612 Imprint Feminist Press at The City University of New York   Published in New York Format Hardback   Height (mm) 230 Publication date 01 Apr 2003   Width (mm) 155 Library of Congress PN151.O4 2   Spine width (mm) 29 DEWEY 809.89287   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

		Introduction: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic: The Lessons Silences Has Taught Us by Shelley Fisher Fishkin
		Silences in Literature - 1962		5
		One Out of Twelve: Writers Who Are Women in Our Century - 1971		22
		Rebecca Harding Davis - 1971, 1972		47
		Silences of the Great in Achievement		122
		Silences - Its Varieties		142
		The Work of Creation and the Circumstances It Demands for Full Functioning		152
		Subterranean Forces - And the Work of Creation in Circumstances Enabling Full Function		159
		When the Claims of Creation Cannot Be Primary		163
		The Literary Situation (1976)		167
		Blight - Its Earliest Expression		178
		A Sense of Wrong Voiced		179
		Literacy		184
		One Out of Twelve - The Figures		186
		The Baby; the Girl-Child; the Girl; the Young Writer-Woman		194
		The Damnation of Women		199
		The Angel in the House		213
		Freeing the Essential Angel		217
		Wives, Mothers, Enablers		218
		Blight. The Hidden Silencer - Breakdown		224
		Hidden Blight - Professional Circumstances		228
		Hidden Blight - Some Effects of Having to Counter and Encounter Harmful Treatment and Circumstances		248
		Other Obstacles, Balks, Encumbrances in Coming to One's Own
		Voice, Vision, Circumference		256
		Creativity; Potentiality. First Generation		261
		Excerpts from Life in the Iron Mills		265
		Miscellany		284
		More...

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