Landscape for a Good Woman

Landscape for a Good Woman PDF Author: Carolyn Steedman
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813512587
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
This book is about lives lived out on the borderlands, lives for which the central interpretative devices of the culture don't quite work. It has a childhood at its centre - my childhood, a personal past - and it is about the disruption of that fifties childhood by the one my mother had lived out before me, and the stories she told about it.' Intricate and inspiring, this unusual book uses autobiographical elements to depict a mother and her daughter and two working-class childhoods (Burnley in the 1920s, South London in the 1950s) and to find a place for their stories in history and politics, in psychoanalysis and feminism. 'Provocative and quite dazzling in its ambitions. . . Beautifully written, intellectually compelling'.' Judith Walkowitz 'Carolyn Steedman's 1950s South London childhood was shaped by her mother's longing: "What she actually wanted were real things, real entities, things she materially lacked, things that a culture and a social system withheld from her... When the world didn't deliver the goods, she held the world to blame." When Carolyn Steedman grows up and begins to look for reflections of her and her mother's lives in history, theory, and literature, she finds that "the tradition of cultural criticism that has employed working-class lives, and their rare expression in literature, has made solid and concrete the absence of psychological individuality - of subjectivity." Through an in-depth comparison of personal experience and prevailing political and social science theory on the psychology and attitudes of working-class people, Landscape for a Good Woman challenges an intellectual tradition that denies "its subjects a particular story, a personal history, except when that story illustrates a general thesis." In this poignantly written and thoroughly researched work, the common theoretical conclusion that the survival struggles of working-class people precludes the time necessary for more genteel "elaboration of relationships" is shot full of delightfully life-affirming holes.' - --From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen.

Landscape for a Good Woman

Landscape for a Good Woman PDF Author: Carolyn Steedman
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813512587
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is about lives lived out on the borderlands, lives for which the central interpretative devices of the culture don't quite work. It has a childhood at its centre - my childhood, a personal past - and it is about the disruption of that fifties childhood by the one my mother had lived out before me, and the stories she told about it.' Intricate and inspiring, this unusual book uses autobiographical elements to depict a mother and her daughter and two working-class childhoods (Burnley in the 1920s, South London in the 1950s) and to find a place for their stories in history and politics, in psychoanalysis and feminism. 'Provocative and quite dazzling in its ambitions. . . Beautifully written, intellectually compelling'.' Judith Walkowitz 'Carolyn Steedman's 1950s South London childhood was shaped by her mother's longing: "What she actually wanted were real things, real entities, things she materially lacked, things that a culture and a social system withheld from her... When the world didn't deliver the goods, she held the world to blame." When Carolyn Steedman grows up and begins to look for reflections of her and her mother's lives in history, theory, and literature, she finds that "the tradition of cultural criticism that has employed working-class lives, and their rare expression in literature, has made solid and concrete the absence of psychological individuality - of subjectivity." Through an in-depth comparison of personal experience and prevailing political and social science theory on the psychology and attitudes of working-class people, Landscape for a Good Woman challenges an intellectual tradition that denies "its subjects a particular story, a personal history, except when that story illustrates a general thesis." In this poignantly written and thoroughly researched work, the common theoretical conclusion that the survival struggles of working-class people precludes the time necessary for more genteel "elaboration of relationships" is shot full of delightfully life-affirming holes.' - --From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen.

Two Lives

Two Lives PDF Author: Vikram Seth
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 9780143104087
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description
Vikram Seth'S Captivating Book Is The Story Of A Century And Of A Love Affair Across A Racial Divide Shanti Behari Seth Was Born On The Eighth Day Of The Eighth Month In The Eighth Year Of The Twentieth Century; He Died Two Years Before Its Close. He Was Brought Up In India In The Late Years Of The Raj, And Was Sent By His Family In The 1930S To Berlin Though He Could Not Speak A Word Of German To Study Medicine And Dentistry. It Was Here, Before He Migrated To Britain, That Shanti'S Path First Crossed That Of His Future Wife. Henny Gerda Caro Was Also Born In 1908, In Berlin, To A Jewish Family, Cultured, Patriotic And Intensely German. When The Family Decided To Have Shanti As A Lodger, Henny S First Reaction Was, 'Don'T Take The Black Man!' But A Friendship Flowered, And When Henny Fled Hitler'S Germany For England, Just One Month Before The War Broke Out, She Was Met At Victoria Station By The Only Person She Knew In The Country: Shanti. Vikram Seth, Their Great-Nephew From India, Arrived In This Childless Couple'S Life As A Teenage Student. Now He Has Woven Together The Astonishing Story Of Shanti And Henny, And The Result Is An Extraordinary Tapestry Of India, The Third Reich And The Second World War, Auschwitz And The Holocaust, Israel And Palestine, Postwar Germany And 1970S Britain. Two Lives Is Both A History Of A Violent Country Seen Through The Eyes Of Two Survivors As Well As An Intimate Portrait Of Their Friendship, Marriage And Abiding Yet Complex Love. Part Biography, Part Memoir, Part Meditation On Our Times, This Is The True Tale Of Two Remarkable Lives A Masterful Telling From One Of Our Greatest Living Writers. Click Here To See Vikram Seth'S Microsite

Grand Canyon Women

Grand Canyon Women PDF Author: Betty Leavengood
Publisher: Grand Canyon Association
ISBN: 9780938216780
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Grand Canyon Women tells the humorous and heartbreaking stories of twenty-six remarkable women--Native Americans, river runners, scientists, wranglers, architects, rangers, hikers, and housewives--each of whom, in the midst of nature's indiscriminate universe, discovers her identity.

Girl in Landscape

Girl in Landscape PDF Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307791777
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and an homage to the great American tradition of the Western. • "Jonathan Lethem's imagination [is]...marvelously fertile." --Newsday The heroine is young Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just before her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to a virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the community and the ancient inhabitants, known only as archbuilders. Girl in Landscape finds Jonathan Lethem twisting forms and literary conventions to create a dazzling, completely unconventional tale.

You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down

You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down PDF Author: Alice Walker
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453223983
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Women stand their ground in the midst of crisis in this story collection by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Color Purple. This collection builds on Alice Walker’s earlier work, the much-praised In Love & Trouble. But unlike her first collection of stories, the women in these tenderly wrought tales face their problems head on, proving powerful and self-possessed even when degraded by others—sometimes by those closest to them. But even as the female protagonists face exploitation, social asymmetries, and casual cruelties, Walker leavens her stories with ample wit and, as always, an eye for the redemptive power of love. A collection that reveals a master of fiction approaching the fullness of her talent, these are the stories Walker produced while penning The Color Purple. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alice Walker including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Women of Steel and Stone

Women of Steel and Stone PDF Author: Anna M. Lewis
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613745117
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
An inspiration for young people who love to design, build, and work with their hands, Women of Steel and Stone tells the stories of 22 female architects, engineers, and landscape designers from the 1800s to today. Engaging profiles based on historical research and firsthand interviews stress how childhood passions, perseverance, and creativity led these women to overcome challenges and break barriers to achieve great success in their professions. Subjects include Marion Mahony Griffin, who worked alongside Frank Lloyd Wright to establish his distinct architectural-drawing style; Emily Warren Roebling, who, after her husband fell ill, took over the duties of chief engineer on the Brooklyn Bridge project; Marian Cruger Coffin, a landscape architect who designed estates of Gilded Age mansions; Beverly L. Greene, the first African American woman in the country to get her architecture license; Zaha Hadid, one of today's best-known architects and the first woman to receive the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize; and many others. Practical information such as lists of top schools in each field; descriptions of specific areas of study and required degrees; and lists of programs for kids and teens, places to visit, and professional organizations, make this an invaluable resource for students, parents, and teachers alike.

The Love of a Good Woman

The Love of a Good Woman PDF Author: Alice Munro
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 1551993988
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
In eight stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes—the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart. Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met—the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her—she must count on herself. Some choices are made—in a will, in a decision to leave home—with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus—from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound, these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.

Good Woman

Good Woman PDF Author: Lucille Clifton
Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.
ISBN: 194268357X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Finalist for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry A landmark collection by National Book Award-winning poet Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 includes the four poetry collections that launched Clifton’s career—Good Times, Good News About the Earth, An Ordinary Woman, and Two-Headed Woman—as well as her haunting prose memoir, Generations. In honor of the 30th anniversary of Lucille Clifton's Pulitzer Prize-nominated poetry collection and memoir, Good Woman is now available for the first time as a deluxe eBook edition. Enhanced with previously unpublished photographs from the Lucille Clifton Estate and a special foreword by Aracelis Girmay, this eBook is a must-have for longtime Clifton fans and newcomers alike.

500 Great Books by Women

500 Great Books by Women PDF Author: Erica Bauermeister
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9780140175905
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Often poorly represented in buyers' guides, women's books are now covered in this articulate and intentionally eclectic reader's guide. Covering a wealth of remarkable novels, narratives, biographies, and more, this resource for general readers offers more than 500 entries--capturing the flavor of each book. Includes seven cross-referenced indexes.

The Female Complaint

The Female Complaint PDF Author: Lauren Berlant
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822389169
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant’s groundbreaking “national sentimentality” project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural “intimate public” in the United States, a “women’s culture” distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, “women’s” books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman’s life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they are. The commodified genres of intimacy, such as “chick lit,” circulate among strangers, enabling insider self-help talk to flourish in an intimate public. Sentimentality and complaint are central to this commercial convention of critique; their relation to the political realm is ambivalent, as politics seems both to threaten sentimental values and to provide certain opportunities for their extension. Pairing literary criticism and historical analysis, Berlant explores the territory of this intimate public sphere through close readings of U.S. women’s literary works and their stage and film adaptations. Her interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its literary descendants reaches from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, touching on Shirley Temple, James Baldwin, and The Bridges of Madison County along the way. Berlant illuminates different permutations of the women’s intimate public through her readings of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat; Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life; Olive Higgins Prouty’s feminist melodrama Now, Voyager; Dorothy Parker’s poetry, prose, and Academy Award–winning screenplay for A Star Is Born; the Fay Weldon novel and Roseanne Barr film The Life and Loves of a She-Devil; and the queer, avant-garde film Showboat 1988–The Remake. The Female Complaint is a major contribution from a leading Americanist.