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Sent: 08 October 2012 20:06 “Outrageous, Dangerous, Unassimilable” Experimentation and Second Wave Feminist Literature Second-wave feminism has been dismissed for being theoretically unsophisticated, essentialist, racist, earnest, and just not funny. Yet the complex cultural interventions and formal experimentations of Seventies feminism belie this characterization. This critical collection of essays builds on ongoing critical work, like Lisa Hogeland’s Feminism and Its Fictions and Kathryn Flannery’s Feminist Literacies, to investigate second-wave feminism’s sustained engagement with aesthetics. The literary was central to Seventies’ feminism: critical studies by feminist scholars such as Kate Millett, Elaine Showalter, and Judith Fetterley challenged traditional notions of the literary and called for rethinking and multiplying aesthetic categories and standards; drama, poetry, and the novel experimented with form, with gender and sexuality, roles and power, and crafted utopian visions for change and practical guides for living. Feminist writers created a dazzling array of texts, forms, and genres because they believed that literature could change the world. Our reductive and somewhat embarrassed characterizations of this period have not accounted for the scope and originality of its vision and its literary production. We seek a wide range of essays investigating the literary interventions of second-wave feminism in the Seventies and early Eighties, including well-known consciousness-raising novels like Jong’s Fear of Flying, French’s The Women’s Room, Piercy’s Small Changes, Walker’s The Color Purple, and Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, and experimental novels, science fiction, romance, mysteries, short stories, poetry, and drama that interact with and expand our understanding of the literary legacies of second-wave feminism. Feminist formal experimentation was central to the larger explorations of identity that increasingly occupied second-wave feminist writers, including writers like Bertha Harris, Joanna Russ, Isabelle Miller, Kathy Acker, Tony Cade Bambara, Michelle Wallace, Germaine Greer, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Gloria Anzaldua. We are also interested in the larger feminist print culture that enabled these literary experiments—feminist publishers, feminist bookstores, feminist scholarship, magazines and mimeographed newspapers, feminist readers, reading practices, distribution systems, and relationships with mainstream publishers and paperback reprints. Please email 500-word abstracts or 25-30 pages articles to Jaime Harker, Associate Professor, University of Mississippi (jlharker@olemiss.edu) and Cecilia Konchar Farr, Professor, St. Catherine’s University (ckfarr@stkate.edu) by January 10, 2013. Final essays are due by June 15, 2013.
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