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Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: American Women Writers

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Date and time
Thursday, September 2, 2021

American Ancestors NEHGS and Boston Public Library present a conversation on feminist history with three remarkable writers. Following up on their award-winning 1979 book, “Madwoman in the Attic,” examining the works of 19th century feminist writers, the duo of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar are back to introduce the women of the 20th century who penned their dreams, their demands, their beliefs and their frustrations as they witnessed social tumult and incremental changes that offered them a glimpse of hope for equality in a very different future. "Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination” maps out key events and introduces the important writers in the second wave of the women’s movement from the 1950s with Plath, Didion, Friedan, and Sontag, and moving into the 21st Century, with Le Guin, Steinem, Morrison, Rankine, and Jemisin, each of whom brings new views, new expressions, creative new forms of protests and changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality.

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Sandra M. Gilbert, Distinguished Professor of of English Emerita at the University of California, Davis, is the author of eight collections of poetry: In the Fourth World (Alabama), The Summer Kitchen (the Heyeck Press), Emily’s Bread, Blood Pressure, Ghost Volcano and Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999 (the last four all from W. W. Norton), The Italian Collection (Depot Books), and Belongings (Norton). Her most recent volume of poems, Aftermath, was also published by Norton, in 2011.
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From The Madwoman in the Attic, the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, and Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism (all with Sandra M. Gilbert) to Rooms of Our Own, my books have focused on gender and literature. In a turn toward racial and religious issues, I published Racechanges, Poetry after Auschwitz, and Judas. Recently, in Memoir of a Debulked Woman and in my column “Living with Cancer” for the online New York Times, my writing addresses the perplexities facing cancer patients. I am currently composing a memoir on late-life love.
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