LaMarre Wins Criminal Justice Research Center Grant
Congratulations to Heather LaMarre! She was recently awarded a Graduate Student Research Grant in the amount of $1000 from OSU's Criminal Justice Research Center. The goal of her project "is to deepen our understanding of how adolescents learn from rap/hip hop music, as well as how the messages delivered through the music and by the artists influence adolescent opinions regarding social and political issues and at-risk behaviors (e.g., crime)."
Perrakis: Adventures of the Spirit
Adventures of the Spirit
The Older Woman in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Other Contemporary Women Writers
Edited by Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis
In Adventures of the Spirit, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis brings together eleven American and Canadian “literary gerontologists” to examine a new kind of adventure for the older woman in literature. This volume of critical essays analyzes recent works by contemporary women writers whose characters’ midlife and later life changes are mapped in their narratives.
Rather than focusing on the painful losses undergone by women of a certain age, recent narratives explore a new kind of adventure of aging, one that is spiritual in nature, enabling new ways of being and becoming, but open-ended and capable of great variation in practice. In particular, these journeys of the spirit focus on the retrospective movement undergone by a midlife or older woman as she is led by inner or outer forces to assess where she has come from and decipher a shape or pattern to her journey.
These journeys do not leave the body behind as they map new spiritual territory. Rather they honor spirit’s embrace of the natural world and relationships as well as its aspirations for evolving development and eternal existence.
The essays in Adventures of the Spirit employ a wide variety of critical lenses to chart these adventures, including archetypal, Sufi, post-colonial, and feminist analysis; archival research; aboriginal life writing; and trauma theory. These studies bring a new understanding to women’s adventure of age in both literary texts and in life.
Steadman: Traveling Economies
Traveling Economies
American Women’s Travel Writing
Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman
The black and white women travel writers whom Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman investigates in Traveling Economies astonish modern readers with their daring, stamina, and courage. That these women traveled at all is surprising: Nancy Prince spent nearly a decade as an African American member of the Russian Imperial Court; Amy Morris Bradley went to Costa Rica as a governess in hopes of saving her health and finances after years as an impoverished teacher in Maine; and Julia Archibald Holmes carried the banner of dress reform to the heights of Pikes Peak and to the pages of a feminist periodical. Developing the concept of the “ragged edge,” Steadman highlights these women’s shared experiences of penury, work, and independence. Genteel poverty, black skin, outspoken feminism, or sometimes all three impacted the material conditions of their ragged-edge travel (early muckraking journalist Anne Royall walked until her feet were a bloody mass of blisters). Being on the ragged edge also affected the way they represented themselves and their travels (Mary Ann Shadd Cary presented her outspoken advocacy of black emigration to Canada as appropriately feminine). Frances Wright used her travel writing to imagine the new nation as a potential utopia for women citizens; she paid a high price for daring to try to change the social terrain she crossed. Steadman’s interdisciplinary work with archives, newspapers, memoirs, and letters and her thoughtful close readings of the resulting evidence recover these important women’s travels and writing and invite us to rethink where and how women went and what they wrote in antebellum America.http://www.ohiostatepress.org
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