Creating Safe Space: Violence and Women's Writing

Creating Safe Space: Violence and Women's Writing defines the role of women's writing in the face of violence and suggests the degree to which violence has affected women from diverse periods, places, and social backgrounds. The book examines the ways in which women use their writing to redefine their experiences of abuse, to give themselves a voice in order to break the silence imposed on women in patriarchal society, and to start challenging and changing a culture that objectifies, degrades, and destroys women. The women discussed in the book include established authors, such as Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Bronte, as well as contemporary artists including Anne Rice and Joy Kogawa. A number of essays illuminate ways in which writing can be employed in women's workshops and college classrooms. They bridge the interdisciplinary distances among the fields of literary criticism, creative writing, psychology, sociology, social welfare, history, journalism, education, and others in which feminist scholars have worked to draw public attention to, and provide solutions to, the various kinds of abuse women endure.

Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION THEORIZING OUR LIVES I Stand Here Naked, and Best Dressed in Theory: Feminist Re-fashionings of Academic Discourse Brenda Daly The Solace of Separation: Feminist Theory, Autobiography, Edith Wharton, and Me Susan L. Woods Fighting Back on Paper and in Real Life: Sexual Abuse Narratives and the Creation of Safe Space Sonia C. Apgar SURVIVING Incest and Rage in Charlotte Brontë's Novelettes Susan Anne Carlson Safe Space or Danger Zone?: Incest and the Paradox of Writing in Woolf's Life Diana L. Swanson "One Need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted": Emily Dickinson's Haunted Space Mary Jo Dondlinger "There is no home there": Re(his)tor(iciz)ing Captivity and the Other in Spofford's "Circumstance" Lisa Logan "Entirely Unprotected": Rebecca Ketcham's Trail Diary Mary Sylwester Safe Space and Storytelling: Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock Linda K. Karell THRIVING The Chicana Girl Writes Her Way In and Out: Space and Bilingualism in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street Tomoko Kuribayashi Abuse and Its Pleasures: Compensatory Fantasy in the Popular Fiction of Anne Rice Annalee Newitz On Blues, Autobiography, and Performative Utterance: The Jouissance of Alberta Hunter Kari J. Winter "In the Center of My Body is a Rift": Trauma and Recovery in Joy Kogawa's Obasan and Itsuka Julie Tharp CONTRIBUTORS SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY AUTHOR INDEX Subject Indexs