Girls Who Wore Black

What do we know about the women who played an important role in creating the literature of the Beat Generation? Until recently, very little. Studies of the movement have effaced or excluded women writers, such as Elise Cowen, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Hettie Jones, and Diane Di Prima, each one a significant figure of the postwar Beat communities. Equally free-thinking and innovative as the founding generation of men, women writers, fluent in Beat, hippie, and women's movement idioms, partook of and bridged two important countercultures of the American mid-century. Persistently foregrounding female experiences in the cold war 1950s and in the counterculture 1960s and in every decade up to the millennium, women writing Beat have brought nonconformity, skepticism, and gender dissent to postmodern culture and literary production in the United States and beyond.

List of contents

Foreword / Ann Charters
Acknowledgments and Permissions  
Visions and Revisions of the Beat Generation / Ronna C. Johnson / Nancy M. Grace
The Worm Queen Emerges: Helen Adam and the Forgotten Ballad Tradition / Kristin Prevallet
Diane di Prima: ``Nothing Is Lost; It Shines In Our Eyes'' / Anthony Libby
``And Then She Went'': Beat Departures and Feminine Transgressions in Joyce Johnson's Come and Join the Dance / Ronna C. Johnson
What I See in Now I Became Hettie Jones / Barrett Watten
Who Writes? Reading Elise Cowen's Poetry / Tony Trigilio
Snapshots, Sand Paintings, and Celluloid: Formal Considerations in the Life Writing of Women Writers from the Beat Generation / Nancy M. Grace
To Deal with Parts and Particulars: Joanne Kyger's Early Epic Poetics / Linda Russo
Revelations of Companionate Love; or, the Hurts of Women: Janine Pommy Vega's Poems to Fernando / Maria Damon
From Revolution to Creation: Beat Desire and Body Poetics in Anne Waldman's Poetry / Peter Puchek
Many Drummers, a Single Dance? / Tim Hunt
Selected Bibliography     
Works Cited and Consulted      
About the Contributors      
Index

About the author

Ronna C. Johnson is a lecturer in the departments of English and American Studies at Tufts University.

Nancy M. Grace is an associate professor in the department of English and director of the Program in Writing at The College of Wooster in Ohio. She is the author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature.

Summary

The contributors to this volume attempt to fill the gap in critical consideration of women writers of the Beat Generation and evaluate their lives and literary output, helping the reader appreciate their unique, diverse voices during a dynamic moment of profound cultural change.

Product details

Assisted by	Nancy M. Grace (Editor), Ronna Johnson (Editor), Ronna C. Johnson (Editor)
Publisher	Rutgers University Press
Languages	English
Product format	Paperback / Softback
Released	01.01.2002
No. of pages	320
Dimensions	144 mm x 228 mm x 19 mm
Weight	535 g
Subjects	Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Politics

Product details

• Assisted by: Nancy M. Grace (Editor), Ronna Johnson (Editor), Ronna C. Johnson (Editor)
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.01.2002
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 144 mm x 228 mm x 19 mm
• Weight: 535 g
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Politics