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Texas Women Writers A Tradition of Their Own Edited by Sylvia Ann Grider and Lou Halsell Rodenberger |
In 1893, a literary critic for the Galveston Daily News lamented that the many women writers in the state had largely gone unnoticed. Her lament has reverberated throughout the past century, as Texas women’s writing was marginalized by canonmakers who paid tribute to masculine western icons—oil derricks, cowboys, and the Alamo—that formed the Texas Mystique and shaped the region’s literature.
Texas Women Writers: A Tradition of Their Own is a sweeping new chapter of a rich literary history covering more than 160 years. Although their writings varied widely in theme, setting, and voice, these writers shared a distinct tradition that was in part defined by their isolation (due to both geography and gender) and was wholly different from that of their male counterparts.
The survey begins with the pioneers and ends with the postmodernists and a glimpse of the new directions in which Texas’ women writers are now heading.
Fane Downs’s piece discusses the pioneers among Texas women writers, who worked between 1830 and 1920. These writers were often diarists, who had no audience but themselves. The central portion of the book consists of critical-biographical portraits of the lives and careers of "the innovators," women writing between 1920 and 1960 who entered new genres as they developed. The survey also covers the developmental history of these major genres that were prevalent in the region and chronologically reviews each generation and the particular challenges of time and place that shaped their work. The era’s writers included Dorothy Scarborough, author of The Wind; Katherine Anne Porter; and Elithe Hamilton Kirkland, author of Love Is a Wild Assault.
Featured prose artists of the later twentieth century include Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, Laura Furman, Beverly Lowry, Shelby Hearon, Jane Gilmore Rushing, and Carolyn Osborn. The authors also discuss children’s books by Texas women.
The careers of African American and Tejana writers (such as, respectively, multi-genre author J. California Cooper and the poet Angela de Hoyos, who has been the subject of numerous critical studies and whose work has been published in a dozen countries) are also examined as part of newly emerging literary traditions.
Concluding sections survey Texas women poets such as Vassar Miller and Naomi Shihab Nye as well as dramatists who have worked in obscurity because of the distinct criteria for dramatic success: a successful play produced in New York, a play regularly produced in the region, or a well-received film adaptation.
The book also lists primary and secondary material in perhaps the most comprehensive bibliography ever devoted to Texas women’s literature.
CONTRIBUTORS:
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Judy Alter Pat Bennett Betsy Feagan Colquitt Paul Christensen Fane Downs Laurie Dudley Betty Sue Flowers Sylvia Grider Nancy Baker Jones Cheryl Lancaster Key Tanya Long William B. Martin Melvin Mason Bryce Milligan |
Pamela Lynn Palmer Judyth Rigler Joyce Roach Lou Halsell Rodenberger Jan Epton Seale Ernestine Sewell Peggy Skaggs Janis Stout Jane Tanner Joyce Thompson Fran Vick Sylvia Whitman Patricia Williams Carole Wolf Mallory Young |
SYLVIA ANN GRIDER is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University. LOU HALSELL RODENBERGER is professor of English at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas.
Number Eight: Tarleton State University
Southwestern Studies in the Humanities
Texas Women Writers
ISBN 0-89096-765-2 paper $17.95
LC 97-7048. 6x9. 480 pp. Bib. Index.
Women’s Studies. Texana. Literary Criticism. Literary History.
Publication Date: August 1997.
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