Late-Nineteenth Century American Poetry, Women Fiction, and Prose - Literature review Example

American Literature – A Survey 2006 Week 1: Late-nineteenth century American Poetry The nineteenth century was a remarkable period in American literature. The realist school, describing life as it is, emerged. At the same time, as a protest to the revivalist trends in religion, the transcedentalists looked for happiness in little things in life. During this period, the Native Americans, the original inhabitants of America, rose in revolt against the white colonizers. The Norton Anthology, Volume C, covered the latter half of this period between 1985-1914. Walt Whitman (1819-92), son of an unsuccessful Long Island farmer, had a difficult childhood. After studying in a charity school in Brooklyn, Whitman worked as an office boy in a lawyer’s firm, a newspaper office and as a small-town school teacher before becoming an author and a poet. Beginning to write poetry in 1854, “Song of Myself”, included in the seventh edition of “Leaves of Grass” became his famous poem. Ordinary life of the American poor was what Whitman could relate to and write about in his poetry. Yet, Whitman could infer greatness out of little things. As Valunas (1999) writes, Whitman realized that the dust of everyday life holds its own marvels. In “Song of Myself”, he flaunts, “I am large, I contain multitudes”. He is compassionate with the sufferers as he had suffered himself, as he says in the poem, "Agonies are one of my changes of garments./I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person". Whitman was a realist who understands and, in this poem, he feels the pain of the witch who is hunted and burnt to death and the slave who toils hard for a living. He ends Section 38 of the poem by urging us to question the harsh reality, “Eleves, I salute you! come forward!/ Continue your annotations, continue your questionings”. Emily Dickenson (1830-1886) lived a secluded life in Amherst, Massachusetts and wrote about the most intricate experiences of life. Like many of her contemporaries, Dickenson rejected the realist attitude and became a transcendental as Massachusetts was the center of this philosophy at the time, believing that the answers to the mysteries of life lay in oneself and not in formal religion. For her, the most important things in life was not made by society but nature, love, religion and individuality. No wonder that she wrote “This is my letter to the world, / That never wrote to me, - / The simple news that Nature told, / With tender majesty”. She found life and death ends in themselves and did not beyond in afterlife. She said, “Life is but life,/ and death but death! / Bliss is but bliss/ and breath but breath!” She suffered a lonely life, away from the revivalist society, writing, “The HEART asks pleasure first / And then, excuse from pain;/ And then, those little anodynes / That deaden suffering”. In the speech “I am alone”, the Native American leader, Cochise (1812-1874), urged the whites to leave their homeland. Cochise, born in the present-day Arizona, led the Chiricahua band of the Apache tribe during a period of violent social upheaval. He was a brave warrior who led his tribe in war against the whites Another contemporary Native American leader, Charlot (1831-1900), also known as Bear Claw, was the chief of the Flathead and resisted in a nonviolent manner of the government’s attempt to drive his people out of their homeland in Idaho, Montana. His speeches – more in the nature of emotional rhetoric - were a contrast to Cochise’ straight-forward speeches. Week 2: Late nineteenth-century American Women Fiction At the turn of the nineteenth century, covered by Volume C of the Norton Anthology, America underwent turmoil politically, socially, culturally and economically. The change from the pre-industrial rural lifestyle to an industrial, urban encouraged many writers – both men and women – to write fiction that had this change as the theme. In particular, women writers, instead of crying over spilt milk, wrote about the changing conditions of women’s lives in an impassionate manner. Edith Wharton stressed on human perception than on the surroundings or background. Concentrating on details of province within the country, Kate Chopin seized the susceptibilities of specific areas (Overview, Am. Lit 1865-1914, NAAL, Vol. C). The realist authors had an ethical responsibility to play a social part: to mirror commonplace life, and help an up-and-coming society to know itself and get its rights. Edith Wharton, for example published ghost stories in addition to novels about etiquette, marriage, household problems and social classes. The Asian-American realist Sui Sin Far wrote fictions about social life in a “real” America, which Wharton hardly ever faced herself and only hazily appreciated. In her works, Kate Chopin showed that the American belief in human liberty was not relevant for all Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At the Cadian Ball, the character Calixta tried to hedge her bets before being remorseful, with harmful consequences. The man (Alcee) she yearned for until Clarisse got him at the ball. However, we could also say that Clarisse, in a sense, lost too. Clarisse had to trick Alcee to snatch him away from Calixta. But at the end of the story, the narrator said, "So the storm passed and every one was happy". If Clarisse and Alicee ends up being happy, who are we to pass judgement? Clarisse won despite the rules of male chauvinism of the society that held back Calixta from explicitly avowing her love for Alcee while Clarisse broke rules and was more forthcoming to achieve her purpose. When Mary Wilkins Freeman published A New England Nun and Other Stories was first published in 1887, she was already a celebrated name and was described like Kate Chopin, a "local color writer”. However, she differed from other writers of the same genre in that she seldom slotted in the thorough depiction of places and people. The details in her stories have a propensity to have figurative implications. She is respected for her plain and straight writing style and her delving into the psyche of her characters. A New England Nun has a very easy yet, perhaps, unnatural story element (enotes.com). Edith Wharton's short story Souls Belated (first published in 1899) is undeniably "a deceptively simple story, elegant and spare", as Cynthia Griffin Wolff, describes it in her introduction to Four Stories by American Women. For C. G. Wolff the final question that is brought up by "this tantalizingly unresolved narrative is to what extent we all unwittingly affirm the very prohibitions from which we seem to suffer." (as cited in A deceptively simple… uni-erfurt.de). The story - a social conspiracy two lovers get ensnared in as a result of their prohibited “love affair” – appears to support such an explanation. I found the moral of the story very true even it today’s society: that love is the only basic rule of trust that one cannot break and if we wishes to live and take pleasure in one’s avid love, we will has to find the middle ground and acknowledge social restrictions and constraints of marriage – otherwise we are left to breathe the life of a pariah. “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” is the main story in Sui Sin Far’s only compilation of short stories published in 1912. The anthology talks about problems of racism, integration, and the estrangement of Chinese Americans in North America. The title story depicts absurd situations of a Chinese after their arrival in the U.S. Far also cleverly mocks at the condescending outlook of the American Government and its white citizens towards Asian refugees. “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” is a comedy in which wives outwit their apparently wise and overriding husbands and love triumphs over social mores and rituals. Everybody we meet in this intricate and enjoyable story lives between two worlds the ancestral and the present in simultaneously -- and harmonizing, in stead of combating with the circumstances they are in-- an racial Chinese personality with an evolving Chinese American identity (ww.norton.com). Week 3: Late-nineteenth century American prose Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain, 1835-1910) grew up in Missouri, the river town that motivated his most famed stories of boyhood escapades. Twain lost his father in an early age and soon went to work as a trainee to help maintain the family. Printing and journalism turned out to be his sources of earnings and as he grew, he journeyed around America. Twain began to write funny sketches for a number of journals and newspapers and it was at that point that he adopted his pen name. In How to Tell a Story, Twain comments that humor is basically an all-American quality whereas comedy belongs to the English culture. It is because humor needs greater span and stroll “around as much as it pleases” while comic stories “must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst”. Ambrose Bierce (Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce, 1842-1914) had a miserable childhood in Ohio and left home as a resentful and cynical young man. At the outburst of the Civil War, he joined the Union Army and later enriched some of his stories with his war experiences. He brought his military experience vividly to life in some of his best stories. Bierce, after his marriage broke up in 1891 and he lost one son in a gunfight and the other due to excess drinking, left for Mexico in 1913, where it is said that he was killed in the rebellious war. In the short stoty An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (451), we find a Civil War soldier put to death by hanging but when the board is lashed away, in place of breaking his neck, he apparently runs away unharmed. The description is ghoulish from the very begiining. Bierce makes a sense of reality blended with fancy. Bierce’s fusion of reality and imagination, metaphors and forewarning and uncertainty, makes this story to induce great passion in readers’ minds. Besides, his use of a narrator, whose attention drifts, works as a way of elucidating the action and the thoughts of Farquhar in his final hours. Though the tale is unclear in numerous ways, Bierce offers the reader some perception regarding why the man is condemned to die. Yet, he never explicitly explains the crime Farquhar committed. (Burnett, Final Moments, caxton, Stockton.edu). Volume C of the Norton Anthology also covered the writings of the early African American leaders. Booker T Washington (1856-1915) was the most important speaker of his time on African-American relations. Most significantly, his Atlanta Exposition Speech (1895) called for a coexistence of the whites and blacks in America. His autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), describes his journey from slavery to an educator and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He tells the story of Tuskegee's growth, from classes held in a shantytown to a campus with many new buildings. In the final chapters of Up From Slavery, Washington describes his career as a public speaker and civil rights activist. The Atlanta Exposition speech is also included. W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was a teacher and writer and researched intensely on African American life. His views were a contrast to T Booker Washington’s of peaceful co-existence where the Blacks would have to settle for less education. Rather, Du Bois was a forerunner of the civil rights movement, which he espoused for in The Souls of Black Folks (1903). In this book, Du Bois developed the notion of “twoness”, a divided awareness of one’s identity: "One ever feels his two-ness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stirrings: two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was a journalist and writer. He traveled through the American West and Mexico and covered the Cuban insurrection in Spain as a roving reporter. About his novel, The Open Boat, Joseph Conrad said, "by the deep and simple humanity of its presentation [the story] seems somehow to illustrate the essentials of life itself, like a symbolic tale." In The Episode of War (1899), Crane described how a lieutenant lost his arm in the Civil War. Week 4: Topics for Literary Essay American Woman Writers Week 5: Literary Analysis Essay Thesis Statement – American woman writers began writing fiction and poetry from the late nineteenth century, describing their lives, pains, anguish and sufferings. The early romance writers, who later wrote Gothic stories about the closeted lives of women, matured into more analytical writing in the works of Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and the like. Modern writers of poetry, like Sylvia Plath, and feminist writers like Donna Haraway, present incisive insight into women’s lives without being aggressive towards men. Week 6: American Poetry Between the Wars Volume D of The Norton Anthology covered American poetry between the wars, when industrialization, urbanization and growth made the country a modern nation. Modernism and technology induced some poets to deal with the clash between science and literature, rich and poor, the distinguished and the undistinguished. The Pulitzer award-winning poet, Edgar Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), described the sufferings of poverty that he experienced himself in his poems. In the poem, The Clerks, Robinson describes the undistinguished life of his childhood friends he had left back in his hometown, “And you that ache so much to be sublime, / And you that feed yourselves with your descent, / What comes of all your visions and your fears? / Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time.” William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) studied medicine but poetry was his first love. He drew ordinary life situations as his subjects and found rhythm in these. This is evident in his poem, “This is Justto Say” (from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939) – “I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox and which / you were probably /saving /for breakfast/ Forgive me / they were delicious / so sweet /and so cold”. Robert Frost (1874 – 1963) was one of America’s greatest poets and four-time winner of the Pulitzer Award. A pastoral poet, he is often associated with rural New England. But his poems have a philosophical edge that transcends beyond any region. His poem, “The Road Not Taken”, is considered the epitome of the American pastoral poetry. The last lines of the poem is an indictment of life’s mission: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- / I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference. Carl Sandburg's (1878-1967) poetry reveals much about the mid-west and its development. He traveled widely and used his experiences in his poetry. He also learned a number of folk songs as a hobo. He was a socialist and affected by the plight of the workers. In “Maybe”, Sandburg writes, “Maybe the wind on the prairie, / The wind on the sea, maybe, / Somebody, somewhere, maybe can tell.” Ezra Pound (1885-1972) is best known for his influence on other poets--and on his political activities during World War II. He admired Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, and made anti-American propaganda broadcasts. As you book indicates, he was to be tried to treason but instead was kept in a hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, D. C. He was a major influence on many poets, but especially William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot. He was known early in his career as an imagist, though he later rejected this approach to poetry. His major works was the Cantos, published in 10 sections between 1925 and 1969. Dante and Homer became sources for inspiration for Pound. Especially Dante's journey through the realms have parallels with his examination of individual experiences in the Cantos: “And round about there is a rabble / Of the filthy, study, unkillable infants of the very poor. / They shall inherit the earth. (from 'The Garden', 1913, 1916) Marianne Moore (1887-1972) studied biology and worked as a librarian. Her poetry, considered modernist periodical, is very meticulous in style. She was a strong influence on other poets and explained what poetry is all about in her poem “Poetry”, where she writes, "we cannot admire/what we cannot understand." Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) grew up in a small Maine village. Her single mother encouraged her to study, write and be independent. She wrote and acted plays. Edna Millay became one of the first American women who dreamed and became liberated and independent. She was politically aware and argued for America’s entry into World War II. She wrote about emotions, women as well as about her life. Her protest against the establishment is evident in “An Eclipse of the Sun is Predicted”, in the last lines of which she writes, “Under that established twilight how could I raise / Beans and corn? I am at war with the black newcomer”. Week 7: Writers of the Harlem Renaissance In the mid-30s, that is during the height of the Great Depression, a group of talented African-American writers produced a sizable body of literature in poetry, fiction, drama, and essay, depicting the pains and trauma of the marginalized race. Claude McKay (1889 -1948) introduced a new attitude of African American literature. Particularly with the publication of Harlem Shadows in 1922, it was an angry and aggressive tone towards racial prejudice in America. At the same time, McKay had all the sympathy and compassion for the Black underclass. As he writes in “The Harlem Dancer”, “APPLAUDING youths laughed with young prostitutes / And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway; / Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes / Blown by black players upon a picnic day. Jean Toomer (1894-1967), the grandson of a prominent Lousiana politician, had mixed birth and spent his childhood with the white population relatively free of racial prejudice. His most significant contribution was Cane (1923), consisting of poetry, short stories, drama and prose describing the African American culture in rural south as well as the north. He once said, “I am of no particular race. I am of the human race, a man at large in the human world, preparing a new race.” Prefacing the section called “Fern” in Cane, Toomer’s poem “Georgia Dusk” describes the idyllic black South. Sensuous and languid, the sawmill halts and people mingle at sunset in anticipation of a folk celebration—the “night’s barbecue.” It is a mélange of sense impressions like “blood-hot eyes,” sweet cane and improvised folk tunes. The poem is filled with lines from the rural scene (“soft settling pollen,” “pyramidal sawdust pile”), similes (“pine-needles fall like sheets of rain”), and metaphor (“blue ghosts of trees”). The African royalty, including king, high priests, and juju-man, or shaman abound (cliffnotes). James Langston Hughes (1902-1967) is one of the most well known proponents of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s and 1940s. Born in a abolitionist family, Hughes showed prodigious traits of being a poet from an early age, maturing with age as he imbibed the pride of being a Negro poet and inculcated the sense of rhythm from the music of blues and jazz that he listened to in Harlem clubs in the 1920s. The Blues form of music was an important part of the African-American cultural movement of the 1920s and 1930s. As a revolt against white Christian dominance, the African-American youth resorted to using black motif, themes and images from lives in the songs. Hughes was greatly influenced by this philosophy and attempted to use similar lyrical techniques in his poetry. In the poem, “Let America be America Again”, Hughes cried to make America what the fathers of the nation had dreamt it to be: “Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be./ Let it be the pioneer on the plain/ Seeking a home where he himself is free. / (America never was America to me.) Zora Neale Hurston (1903 – 1960) was trained as an ethnologist and she combined her knowledge about culture with her poetry. Her best-known work, Their Eyes wer Watching God, published in 1937, did not fit into the typical genre of black stories. The blacks hated her for taking grants from the whites and the whites found her “too black”. When she died, Hurston was an almost forgotten poet, rediscovered by Alice Walker in the 1970s (about.com) Countee Culleen (1903 – 1946) was a multifarious personality - poet, anthologist, novelist, translator, children's writer, and playwright. Not much is known about his birth. He was adopted in 1918 by Reverend Frederick A. and Carolyn Belle (Mitchell) Cullen. He was a black activist minister and established the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church. His writing in the 1920s was a precursor of the Harlem Renaissance. Week 8: American Fiction Between the Wars Sherwood Anderson (1876 – 1941) grew up in Ohio, married into a business family and set up his mail-order business. Nearing middle age, Anderson left all of this and left for Chicago to pursue his literary dreams. His most famous Winnesberg, Ohio Stories (1919) was a midway between the regional local colorists at the turn of the nineteenth century and the modernists like Hemingway and Faulkner. In “Queer” in the compilation, an ordinary man, Elmer, questions how his culture defines what is considered as the reality. Elmer considers jumping a freight train, leaving town, to "lose himself in the crowds," "become like other men," and "be indistinguishable." It is a question of identity. Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980 was an essayist, short story writer and journalist. The only novel that she wrote was The Ship of Fools (1962). She began life as a communist sympathizer but later became friends to a Nazi. She hailed from the south but led a fairly cosmopolitan life. Her first collection of short stories was Flowering Judas in 1930. The story is set in one evening when Laura is courted by the corrupt revolutionary, Braggioni. Laura, an erstwhile Catholic, rejects the hypocrisy of the socialists. The story has imageries of Christian imagery, highlighted by Judas, to describe lost faith. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940) wrote about the Jazz Age and the youth whiling about their time, their lifestyles leading to the Great Depression. Babylon Revisited (1931) was his most renowned work. Various themes are worked at in this short story but the most important is that of split identity. The protagonist, Charlie Wales, is trying to rectify his life and struggles through success and failure. Week 10: Topic for Research Paper Feminine Text Week 11: Work on Research Paper Women’s literature, enriched and endowed with many attributes and critical insights, is still branded as the voice of the man-hating feminists. Theorists like Helene Cixous and Julien Kristeva attempt to answer the questions that many women writers may have themselves tried to find. Why have women's voices been missing in a plentiful practice of language that crosses over two thousand years? Is it just because women are not allowed in the realm of education that would have enabled them into the speech-society? Or, is there in fact a separate way of communication in the woman's world, in a unique language that has made it hard for women to connect with the world-at-large. Week 12: American Prose since 1945 John Cheever (1912-1984) mainly wrote about the spiritual and emotional emptiness of modern life, particularly that of the American suburban middle class. He is often referred to as the “Chekhov of the Suburbs”. “The Swimmer” (1964) deals with the concept that a man lives through various mental ages at the same time. Neddy Merrill leaves a friends pool party but, excited with his one experience, returns home swimming from one pool to another. However, he ultimately fails to reach his goal and ends up finding his house locked and empty. African-American author, James Baldwin (1924 – 1987), pricked the conscience of Americans by showing how the original concept of democracy has failed. His experiences as an unhappy childhood is depicted in the story, “Going to Meet the Man”, where a troubled child is led to racism. Flannery O’Connor (1925 - 1964), a devout Catholic and chronically, showed immense sensibilities and insight into the thirty two short stories and two novels that she wrote. O’Connory particularly excelled in describing small-town lives. The short story, “The Life You Save May be Your Own”, a traveling worker with one arm arrives at a farm claiming to be more interested in spirits than in objects. Week 13: Recent American Fiction Raymond Carver (1938 – 1988), also a poet, has revitalized the genre of short stories in America. His style of realistic writing is often compared to that of Hemingway and Stephen Crane. Carver’s “Cathedral” (1983) depicts a blind man trying to draw a cathedral as described by the irritable narrator. It is a communication between the narrator and the blind man as much with the narrator himself. Alice Walker’s (1944 - ) "Everyday Use," published in 1973, is a short story about an African-American family. It centers the theme of intrinsic artistic qualities of the African creative tradition and its suave, urbane depiction by the new generation of African-American boasting about their cultural roots as an outsider rather than living it themselves. Without taking any sides in particular, Walker, the “womanist” writer (Maggie) torn between her African roots and American existence, establishes the tales of three creative woman—the mother (Mama) and her two daughters –each capable and talented in their own way and the rift between their ideas of identity and definition of art and culture. Walker is aware of the contradictions of living as woman writer with a traquil and composed ethnic origin in the hurried and fast life of the West. The timeless, unpurturbed lifestyle that her family heritage represents, however authentic it appears, hangs heavily on her creative yet urban way of life. The art and culture that her heritage approves of seems to her as an unframed work which need to be properly re-arranged in order to match the worth it needs. Mama and Maggie also represents art—yet in a sorry shape of things albeit unpolluted and unpretentious. Could there be any compromise as to break up the boundaries of time that stand as impediments to their undertsnading and threby give art and heritage a new and hhealthy face. As Walker points out, it possible only when each comes out o her time-frame and re-invent a warm relation that was tre in the past and that can still be revoked. Judith Ortiz Cofer (1952 - ), a Puerto Rican now living in the United States, has encompassed the style of memoir and story-telling, based on Spanish and classical myths, in her fiction. In her story, “The Witch’s Husband”, Cofer uses a double narrative technique giving the reader the viewpoints of Abuela and her grand daughter. Week 14: American Poetry since 1945 Elizabeth Bishop (1911- 1979) lost her father on her first birthday and her mother had to be admitted to a mental asylum. Spending her childhood with her maternal grandparents, Bishop spent her childhood in Massachusetts and adolescence in Florida and Europe. She lived much of her youth in Brazil returning to the United States after her lesbian partner committed suicide. In her poetry, Bishop recreated her visions of all the countries she has lived in. Her poem “The Fish”, which appears too large and ugly, emerged out of her experiences of the salt water fish. It is a narrative poem describing an amateur fisher, fishing in a “rented boat”. Metaphors are used to describe the fish: “Like medals with their ribbons / frayed and wavering, / a five-haired beard of wisdom / trailing from his aching jaw.” African American poet, Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 –2000), was encouraged to read poetry from an early age by Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson. Her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), brought her critical fame instantly. A prolific writer of poems, essays and reviews, Brooks’ poetry has moved from traditional forms of ballads, sonnets, Chaucerian and Spenserian stanzas to unrestricted free verse of the Blues. Her characters are generally drawn from the Black underclass. In “We Real Cool”, she writes, “We real cool. / We / Left school. We / Lurk late. We / Strike straight. We / Sing sin. We /Thin gin. We / Jazz June. We / Die soon.” Allen Ginsberg (1929 – 1997) was a spiritual seeker and the founder of the Beat Generation, a major literary movement of the modern times. His first book of poems, Howl, had to overcome censorship trial for obscenity before becoming one of the most widely read books of poetry. Howl opens with “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving / hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry / fix, /angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the / starry dynamo in the machinery of night, / who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the / supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of / cities contemplating jazz”. Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) had to juggle between life as a poet, psychiatric troubles and a difficult marriage to poet, Ted Hughes. Her poetry is stylistic, merges comedy with seriousness, and uses free-form structure. In “Black Rook in Rainy Weather, Plath indulges in self-irony and urges herself to develop camaraderie with nature. References Valiunas, Algis, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. Commentary. Volume: 107. Issue: 6. June 1999. 1999 Volume C, http://www.wwnorton.com/naal/vol_C/welcome.htm Dickenson, Emily (1830-1896), Complete Poems, 1924, www.bartleby.com Webster's American Biographies; Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/bios/6.html Kate Chopin, biography, Volume C: American Literature, 1865-1914, The Norton Anthology of American Literature (NAAL), http://www.wwnorton.com/naal/Vol_C/explorations/chopin.htm The T. Rex Essay, Women's Reactions to Oppression in Gilman and Chopin http://quinnell.us/literature/reviews/yellowchopin.html http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/w/mary-e-wilkins-freeman/ Volume C, 847-865, Edith Wharton: “Souls Belated” 847-865 A deceptively simple story, http://www.unierfurt.de/eestudies/eese/artic23/trauber/8_2003.html#ukap1 Sui Sin Far, http://www.wwnorton.com/naal/vol_C/explorations/sinfar.htm Samuel, L. Clemens (Mark Twain), Volume C, American Literature, 1865-1914, NAAL, http://www.wwnorton.com/naal/Vol_C/explorations/clemens.htm How to Tell a Story (408-11), Volume C, American Literature, NAAL http://www.wwnorton.com/naal/vol_C/explorations/bierce.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Bierce Burnett, Kristin Final Moments, http://caxton.stockton.edu/dancingbears/stories/storyReader$15 Poets Corner, http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/mckay02.html#35 About.com, Women History Profile, http://womenshistory.about.com/od/hurstonzoraneale/p/hurston_bio.htm Modern American Poetry, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/ Read More