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This book highlights the multiplicity of American women’s writing related to liminality and hybridity from its beginnings to the contemporary moment. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these concepts as they appear in American women’s writing contest as well as perpetuate exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The collection’s introduction, three unit introductions, fourteen individual essays, and afterward facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women writers. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on canonical writers as well as introduce readers to new authors. As a whole, the collection demonstrates American women’s writing is “threshold writing,” or writing that occupies a liminal, hybrid space that both delimits borders and offers enticing openings Introduction: Threshold Thinking, Rita Bode and Kristin J. Jacobson -- Section I Early American Thresholds Introduction: Early American Women Writers: The Potentiality of the Continual Self-Creating Act, Kristin Allukian -- ‘Sweet Cement:’ Occasioning Bathsheba Bowers’ An Alarm Sounded to Prepare the Inhabitants of the World to Meet the Lord in the Way of His Judgment, Nicholas K. Mohlmann -- Beyond ‘The Bars’: Lucy Terry Prince and the Margins of the Colonial Landscape, Ann A. Huse -- The Liminal Time of Friendship: Narrative Dely in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, Molly Ball -- ‘We cannot be indifferent’: Native Americans and the Students of the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies, Gregory D. Specter -- Section II Nineteenth Century Thresholds Introduction: Resistance and Alternative Histories in Nineteenth-century Women’s Writing, Rickie-Ann Legleitner -- Changing is Surviving: Transformation as Resistance in the Ojibwe Stories of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Sarah Olivier -- Inhabiting the Liminal: The Architecture of Single Life in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Fiction, Michelle Gaffner Wood -- Contesting Sentimentalism: Animal-Human Bonds and Boundaries in Grace Greenwood’s History of My Pets, Kerstin Rudolph -- ‘The Third Sex’: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians in Queer, Liminal Literary Spaces, Margaret Jay Jessee -- ‘Costume de ghost’: Liminality in Grace King’s Balcony Stories, Stephanie Durrans -- Section III Twentieth-Century and Twenty-First-Century Thresholds Introduction: A Fragile Optimism: Writing Liminality and Hybridity in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, Leslie Allison -- La mujer en llamas: Legal Storytelling in Lucha Corpi’s Black Widow’s Wardrobe, Sandra Ruiz -- States of Exception and Arab American Women’s Poetry After 9/11: Liminality and Community in Suheir Hammad’s ‘first writing since’ and D.H. Melhem’s ‘September 11, 2001, World Trade Center, Aftermath’, Birgit Spengler -- Still Moving: Gabrielle Bell’s Graphic Auto-Fiction, Shiamin Kwa -- Extreme Sex: Contemporary American Women Writers at the Margins, Beth Widmaier Capo -- Afterword: Beyond Thresholds: Suggestions for Further Research and Teaching Resources
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