Twelve Stories by American Women

A collection of twelve essential short stories by iconic American women writers that introduces a more diverse canon and emphasizes non-white and queer writers to better represent the experiences of all American women and to understand the importance of the short story for women

A Penguin Classic

When Four Stories by American Women was first published by Penguin Classics in 1990, it understandably reflected the second-wave feminist interpretations of that time--a period marked by an impressive recovery of what were then considered to be minor American writers. Since then, the four white women writers included in the volume--Rebecca Harding Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edith Wharton--have become canonical figures, and scholars have grown to see their work as only a small part of the rich tapestry of American women's lives, values, and political beliefs in the fertile period of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century American literature. Today, we not only have a deeper understanding of the significance of these texts and the complicated nature of their authors' ideological orientations, scholars and educators have also expanded the canon of American women writers to more frequently foreground the voices of non-white and queer writers whose work speaks more fully to the experiences and beliefs of all American women. This updated and expanded volume, Twelve Stories by American Women edited by Arielle Zibrak, offers a more diverse selection of writers--including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mar?a Cristina Mena, Zitkala-Sa, Sui Sin Far, and Barbara E. Pope--; covers hot-button issues such as environmentalism, queerness, and marital status; and provides a new introduction that highlights the developments in the critical understanding of turn-of-the-century American women writers in all of their complexity.

Author: Arielle Zibrak
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 03/18/2025
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.47lbs
Size: 7.75h x 5.06w x 0.47d
ISBN: 9780143138174

About the Author
Arielle Zibrak is Professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Wyoming. She is the author of Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures (New York University Press, 2021) and Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023) and the editor of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence New Centenary Essays (Bloomsbury, 2019).