Sandra M. Gilbert

"Sandra Gilbert's poems are beautifully situated at the intersection of craft and feeling." -Billy Collins The title of this collection-at times mournful, sardonic, and joyous-refers to the grief in the wake of loss. Yet these poems aren't just about the consequences of loss but also about the complex experiences of endurance, acquiescence, and rebirth that, with luck, mark the aftermath of sorrow. from "Aftermath: Kite" But the thought is only paper after all, a soul that clings to a stick, tears open, shreds as if it's flung to the ground in a final shiny fall, and at last the line goes limp, the climbing ends. Beyond the rush & sweep, an arc of silence- though a mind imagined this flight, & proved it once.

The editors have included traditional ballads about maternity and courtly elegies for or by mothers as well as landmark nineteenth-century tributes to mothers and early twentieth-century meditations on motherhood.MotherSongs opens with poems about pregnancy, labor, delivery, and nursing and moves to poems about women raising children, delighting in their growth, or mourning their loss. The volume then turns to poems by sons and daughters who "remember mama." Mythic mothers and mother goddesses, moral or political reflections on maternity, and philosophical analyses of the meaning of motherhood are also represented. Taken together, the works collected here bear witness to the powerful ways in which motherhood has been transformed into art and artistry has been shaped by maternity.

Forty years after their first groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, The Madwoman in the Attic, award-winning collaborators Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar map the literary history of feminism’s second wave. From its stirrings in the midcentury — when Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan, and Joan Didion found their voices and Diane di Prima, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde discovered community in rebellion — to a resurgence in the new millennium in the writings of Alison Bechdel, Claudia Rankine, and N. K. Jemisin, Gilbert and Gubar trace the evolution of feminist literature. They offer lucid, compassionate, and piercing readings of major works by these writers and others, including Adrienne Rich, Ursula K. Le Guin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Susan Sontag, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Toni Morrison. Activists and theorists like Nina Simone, Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler also populate these pages as Gilbert and Gubar examine the overlapping terrain of literature and politics in a comprehensive portrait of an expanding movement. As Gilbert and Gubar chart feminist gains — including creative new forms of protests and changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality — they show how the legacies of second wave feminists, and the misogynistic culture they fought, extend to the present. In doing so, they celebrate the diversity and urgency of women who have turned passionate rage into powerful writing.

An analysis of Victorian women writers, this pathbreaking book of feminist literary criticism is now reissued with a substantial new introduction by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar that reveals the origins of their revolutionary realization in the 1970s that "the personal was the political, the sexual was the textual." Contents: The Queen's looking glass: female creativity, male images of women, and the metaphor of literary paternity -- Infection in the sentence: the women writer and the anxiety of authorship -- The parables of the cave -- Shut up in prose: gender and genre in Austen's Juvenilia -- Jane Austen's cover story (and its secret agents) -- Milton's bogey: patriarchal poetry and women readers -- Horror's twin: Mary Shelley's monstrous Eve -- Looking oppositely: Emily Brontë's bible of hell -- A secret, inward wound: The professor's pupil -- A dialogue of self and soul: plain Jane's progress -- The genesis of hunger, according to Shirley -- The buried life of Lucy Snowe -- Made keen by loss: George Eliot's veiled vision -- George Eliot as the angel of destruction -- The aesthetics of renunciation -- A woman, white: Emily Dickinson's yarn of pearl.

Long the standard teaching anthology, the landmark Norton Anthology of Literature by Women has introduced generations of readers to the rich variety of women’s writing in English. Now, the much-anticipated Third Edition responds to the wealth of writing by women across the globe with the inclusion of 61 new authors (219 in all) whose diverse works span six centuries.  A more flexible two-volume format and a versatile new companion reader make the Third Edition an even better teaching tool. "As diversity itself has shaped the evolution of feminist criticism, from its early preoccupation with women's shared experiences to its more recent absorption in the complex issues and assumptions informing English-language texts by women writers of diverse geographical, cultural, racial, sexual, religious, and class origins and influences, so diversity has shaped the revisions of this anthology." ―From the Preface