Girls who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat GenerationRonna Johnson, Nancy McCampbell Grace "Girls Who Wore Black recovers neglected women writers who deserve more attention for their writing and for their historical role in the mid-century arts scene. This collection of essays reopens and revises the Beat canon, Beat history, and Beat poetics; it is an important contribution to literary criticism and history."-Jennie Skerl, author of A Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles "Ronna Johnson and Nancy Grace have done an invaluable service for students of American literature: their collection begins with an essential essay about the three generations of Beat women and then provides fine contributions by critics Anthony Libby, Linda Russo, Maria Damon, Tim Hunt, and others. The value of this book is so clear one must wonder why it wasn't available much earlier."-Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill What do we know about the women who played an important role in creating the literature of the Beat Generation? Until recently, very little. Studies of the movement have effaced or excluded women writers, such as Elise Cowen, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Hettie Jones, and Diane Di Prima, each one a significant figure of the postwar Beat communities. Equally free-thinking and innovative as the founding generation of men, women writers, fluent in Beat, hippie, and women's movement idioms, partook of and bridged two important countercultures of the American mid-century. Persistently foregrounding female experiences in the cold war 1950s and in the counterculture 1960s and in every decade up to the millennium, women writing Beat have brought nonconformity, skepticism, and gender dissent to postmodern culture and literary production in the United States and beyond. Ronna C. Johnson is a lecturer in the departments of English and American Studies at Tufts University. Nancy M. Grace is an associate professor in the department of English and director of the Program in Writing at The College of Wooster in Ohio. She is the author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature. |
Contents
Helen Adam and the Forgotten | 19 |
Joanne Kygers | 21 |
Nothing Is Lost It Shines In Our Eyes | 45 |
Beat Departures and Feminine | 69 |
SEE IN HOW I BECAME HETTIE JONES | 96 |
WHO WRITES? Reading Elise Cowens Poetry | 119 |
Other editions - View all
Girls who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation Ronna Johnson,Nancy McCampbell Grace No preview available - 2002 |
Common terms and phrases
Adam's aesthetic agency Allen Ginsberg American Poetry Amiri Baraka Anne Waldman artists ballads Baraka Beat discourse Beat female Beat literary Beat women Beat's Beatnik Became Hettie Jones body bohemian chick context counterculture Cowen's poetry critical cultural desire Diane di Prima Duncan Elise Cowen emergence essay existential experience female subjectivity feminism feminist figure Frazer gender girl Glassman Helen Adam Hettie Jones hipster identity Iovis Jack Kerouac Janine Pommy Vega jazz Joanne Kyger Join the Dance Jones's Joyce Johnson Kaddish Kyger language LeRoi Jones lived male Beat writers memoir Minor Characters move myth narrative novel Odyssey Olson Penelope Peter poet poetic politics Pommy Vega postwar Press Prima's reader role romantic San Francisco Renaissance scene second-wave sexual sixties social speaker Spicer story Susan Tapestry texts textual tion tradition transformation Vega's voice Waldman woman women Beat writers women writers Worm Queen writing York