Speaking the Other Self

Book excerpt: Exploring a variety of writers over an array of time periods, subject matter, race and ethnicity, sexual preference, tradition, genre, and style, this volume represents the fruits of the dramatic and celebrated growth of the study of American women writers today. From established figures such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Katherine Ann Porter to emerging voices including early American novelist Tabitha Tenney; the first African American novelist, Harriet E. Wilson; modern dramatist Sophie Treadwell; and contemporaries such as Sandra Cisneros, Grace Paley, and June Jordan, the essays present fresh approaches and furnish a wealth of illustrations for the multiple selves created and addressed in women's writing. These selves intersect and connect to embody a multiethnic rhetoric of the “self” that is uniquely feminine and uniquely American. Calling attention to their “American feminist rhetoric,” Jeanne Campbell Reesman identifies many connections among different feminist, poststructuralist, narratological, and comparativist strategies. The voices of Speaking the Other Self well represent the inner and outer, speaking and hearing, center and frame in women's writing in America, their intersections constructing an ongoing conversation, a borderland of new possibilities—a borderland with no borders, no barriers to thought and response and change, no end of possible voices and selves.