Sister's Choice

Are American women writers from different eras and different backgrounds connected by common threads in a coherent tradition? How have the relationships between women''s rights women''s rites and women''s writing figured in the history of literature by women in the United States? Drawing on a wide range of writers from Margaret Fuller to Alice Walker Elaine Showalter argues that post-colonial as well as feminist literary theory can help us understand the hybrid intertextual and changing forms of American women''s writing and the way that `women''s culture'' intersects with other cultural forms. Showalter looks closely at three American classics - Little Women The Awakening and The House of Mirth - and traces the transformations in such major themes images and genres of American women''s writing as the American Miranda the Female Gothic and the patchwork quilt. Ending with a moving description of the AIDS Memorial Quilt she shows how the women''s tradition is a literary quilt that offers a new map of a changing America.