"Authorship of the Battle Hymn of the Republic made [19th-century aspiring poet and playwright Julia Ward Lowe] celebrated and revered. But Julia was also continuing to fight a civil war at home; she became a pacifist, suffragist, and world traveler. She came into her own as a tireless campaigner for women's rights and social reform ... Elaine Showalter tells the story of Howe's determined self-creation and brings to life the society she inhabited...

" ... Exploration of the extraordinary parallels between the ends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their representations in literature, art, and film"--Jacket, page [2].

Joyce Carol Oates's Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. In Expensive People, Oates takes a provocative and suspenseful look at the roiling secrets of America's affluent suburbs. Set in the late 1960s, this first-person confession is narrated by Richard Everett, a precocious and obese boy who sees himself as a minor character in the alarming drama unfolding...

""Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." It's one of the most famous opening lines in literature, that of Virginia Woolf's beloved masterpiece of time, memory, and the city. In the wake of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell- shock and on the brink of madness....

A collection of critical essays on this well-known American writer and her works.

"Alexandra, daughter of a Swedish immigrant farmer in Nebraska, inherits the family farm and finds love with an old friend." "The heroic battle for survival of simple pioneer folk in the Nebraska country of the 1880s. John Bergson, a Swedish farmer, struggles desperately with the soil but dies unsatisfied. His daughter Alexandra resolves to vindicate his faith, and her strong character carries her weak older brothers and her mother alng to a new zest...

Presents an annotated edition of the 1899 novel about a Victorian-era woman who finds passionate physical love with a young man she meets while on vacation; and includes biographical, historical, and cultural documents related to the novel's publication, and a selection of critical essays.