Shari Benstock

Offers profiles of British and American expatriate women in Paris, including Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, H.D., Katherine Anne Porter, and Edith Wharton

Paris, 1900-1940

Women of the Left Bank

Morris Beja

Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium

Coping with Joyce

University Shari Benstock

Now available in a durable paperback edition, Shari Benstock's critically acclaimed, best-selling Women of the Left Bank is a fascinating exploration of the lives and works of some two dozen American, English, and French women whose talent shaped the Paris expatriate experience in the century's early years. This ambitious historical, biographical, and critical study has taken its place among the foremost works of literary criticism. Maurice Beebe calls it a distinguished contribution to modern literary history. Jane Marcus hails it as the first serious literary history of the period and its women writers, making along the way no small contribution to our understanding of the relationships between women artists and their male counterparts, from Henry James to Hemingway, Joyce, Picasso, and Pound.

A “valuable and intriguing” study of the lives and works of literary women who shaped expatriate Paris (NPR). Focusing on some two dozen American, English, and French women whose talent shaped the Paris expatriate experience in the early twentieth century, from Anais Nin to Alice B. Toklas and beyond, this book shines new light on how gender was experienced and expressed during an important moment in modern literary history. "Shari Benstock . . . weaves together, with great skill, the histories of an extraordinary group of talented women—publishers like Sylvia Beach, Caresse Crosby, Margaret Anderson, and Jane Heap, novelists Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, and Edith Wharton. She examines in some depth the writing produced by poets, journalists and novelists, thus combining literary criticism and social history in a seamless running narrative.” —NPR “Through their writings, including unpublished and newly available documentary sources of the period, Djuna Barnes, Nancy Cunard, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton and others are revealed as significant in the development of modernism, imagism and other avant-garde movements in which they were overshadowed or ignored by their male counterparts. . . . Benstock tracks the sexually liberated lifestyles and the creative originality of these women with a wealth of documentation.” —Publishers Weekly “An inspiration, setting a standard for literary history and feminist criticism that will be difficult to surpass.” —American Literature

Praise for the first edition (published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1994): "Here, at last, is Edith Wharton in all her power, her ambitions, and her angers. For the first time we have a biography using new material and allowing us to acclaim an accomplished though prejudiced woman, one who was against women's suffrage, who surrounded herself with famous men, yet was the author of insightful, feminist novels. Here is the truth, brilliantly recounted, compelling to read." —Carolyn G. Heilbrun, author ofWriting a Woman's Life "This may be the best-written biography of the [1990s]. Evocative, rich in new material, and always focused on Edith Wharton the woman, Benstock's way of telling the woman writer's story is superb. If we thought we knew the Wharton story before, this book proves us wrong." —Linda Wagner-Martin, author ofSylvia Plath: A Biography "It was indeed an age of innocence but it was also an age of experience. Shari Benstock's biography of Edith Wharton captures that world. Beautifully researched and impressively thorough, this new biography is especially interesting about Wharton's family and her relationships. It will benefit all students and lovers of her fiction." —Fred Kaplan, author ofHenry James: The Imagination of Genius "Shari Benstock's biography is quite simply the standard biography of Edith Wharton. This is true even though other excellent biographies preceded hers." —Carol J. Singley, author ofEdith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit

A Biography of Edith Wharton

No Gifts from Chance

Edith Wharton

Ross C. Murfin

Supryia M. Ray

Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms 2nd Ed + House of Mirth

Henry James

Peter G. Beidler

House of Mirth + Turn of the Screw 2nd Ed

Suzanne Ferriss

Until recently, fashion was considered the "F-word" in intellectual circles, dismissed as unworthy of serious attention. Yet no area of life, no individual moment, stands outside fashion's discourses. Intuitively, we all know that clothing is a language, incessantly communicating messages about its wearer. But who speaks this language, to whom is it addressed, what does it mean, and how are its meanings established and transformed? On Fashion explores the ways our material, political, psychological, sexual, even intellectual lives are woven into fashion's fabric. This stimulating collection of essays explores fashion's symbolic and figurative functions in photography, cinema, and video; in consumerism, postmodernism, and feminism; in political and material culture; and in self-definition and subjectivity. They demonstrate the pervasive reach of fashion and its expressions. This collection contains over sixty photographs and illustrations and includes essays by Barbara Brodman, Mary Ann Caws, Linda Benn DeLibero, Hlne Cixous, Diana Fuss, Cheryl Herr, Karla Jay, Deborah Jenson, Douglas Kellner, Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey, Leslie W. Rabine, Andrew Ross, Sonia Rykiel, Carol Shloss, Kaja Silverman, Maureen Turim, and Iris Marion Young.

On Fashion

A biography of the noted author, tracing her evolution from shy debutante to the social chronicler of her age.

This collection of twelve essays discusses the principles and practices of women's autobiographical writing in the United States, England, and France from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Employing feminist and poststructuralist methodologies, t

Shari Benstock

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