Silences
Tillie Olsen's landmark essay collection revisits how literary history has muted women and working-class writers, and how criticism can recover the voices that were pushed aside. Using figures such as Melville, Hardy, Cather, and Woolf, it asks who gets written into the canon, who is left out, and why.
Work Information
A classic study of literary silence and the voices hidden behind it.
First published in 1978, Tillie Olsen's Silences returned in a 25th-anniversary paperback that revisits the way women and working-class writers were pushed to the margins of literary history. Drawing on authors' letters, diaries, and recovered reading lists, it shows how unspoken experience has shaped the limits of literature and the possibilities of recovery.
Book Information
- Publisher
- The Feminist Press at CUNY
- Published
- 2003-04-01
- Pages
- 368 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.2 x 2.5 x 22.9 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781558614406
- ISBN-10
- 1558614400
- Category
- 洋書/Education & Reference/Writing, Research & Publishing Guides/Research
A landmark survey of disenfranchised literary voices and the forces that seek to silence them—from the influential activist and author of Tell Me a Riddle . With this groundbreaking work, Olsen revolutionized the study of literature by shedding critical light on the writings of marginalized women and working-class people. From the excavated testimony of authors’ letters and diaries, Olsen shows us the many ways the creative spirit, especially in those disadvantaged by gender, class, or race, has been suppressed through the years. Olsen recounts the torments of Herman Melville, the shame that brought Willa Cather to a dead halt, and the struggles of Olsen’s personal heroine Virginia Woolf, the greatest exemplar of a writer who confronted the forces that worked to silence her. First published in 1978, Silences expanded the literary canon and the ways readers engage with literature. This 25th-anniversary edition includes Olsen’s classic reading lists of forgotten authors and a new introduction. Bracing and prescient, Silences remains “of primary importance to those who want to understand how art is generated or subverted and to those trying to create it themselves” (Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review ). “A valuable book, an angry book, a call to action.” —Maxine Hong Kingston “ Silences helped me to keep my sanity many a day.” —Gloria Naylor, author of Mama Day “[ Silences is] ‘the Bible.’ I constantly return to it.” —Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street “ Silences will, like A Room of One’s Own , be quoted where there is talk of the circumstances in which literature is possible.” —Adrienne Rich, author of Diving into the Wreck
Activist and author Tillie Olsen is best known for her prize-winning fiction Tell Me a Riddle and Yonnondio: From the Thirties . She taught at MIT, Stanford, and Amherst. Olsen is an recipient of an Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Literature from the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Reviews
-
I love the book
-
Written back in the day when it was difficult for women's voices to be heard, Silences considers why that was.
-
Olsen's points are as valid today as they were when she wrote this book.
-
Great book.