What makes Emily Dickinson such a fascinating poet? Although she left no personal poetics, she did define her own response to poetry as an immediate sensual reaction: "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry" (L. 342a). Presumably, her own poetry is most significant not in what it communicates to a reader...

The first woman to win the Hugo Award (given annually by the World Science Fiction convention) and the Nebula Award (given annually by the Science Fiction Writers of America), Anne McCaffrey has invented many worlds of science fiction. Her series The Dragonriders of Pern has become one of the most widely read in science fiction history. This is the first complete critical study of her work. It examines all of her novels to date, both individual and...

This book uses traditional methods to show that Edith Wharton's learning in literature and the fine arts was unusually masterful, that she applied her knowledge to create new models of literary allusion, and that in her work she planted clues to personal secrets. The effects of this study is to require reassessment not only of the critical possibilities of Edith Wharton's work and the private life about which she was so reticent but also of her position...

Authors include Anne Bradstreet, Mary White Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, Elizabeth Sampson Sullivan Ashbridge, Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail Smith Adams, Judith Sargent Murray, Phillis Wheatley, Susanna Haswell Rowson, Jarena Lee, Eliza Southgate Bowne, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Sarah Moore Grimke, Sojourner Truth, Caroline Stansbury Kirkland, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sara Willis Eldredge Farrington Parton (Fanny Fern), Harriet...