Harry Levitt writes (Jan. 19, 2009):

Shelley Fisher Fishkin has a new book coming out in March: Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture, published by Palgrave/Macmillan. Parts of the book discuss aspects of being in the first Yale College class to include women.

From the book’s jacket:

This book offers historically-grounded, feminist interventions into American literary history by one of the country’s leading scholars in American Studies. It integrates criticism, biography, social history, popular culture, and personal narrative to explore the poetry, fiction, nonfiction and drama of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-American, Jewish-American, African-American, and Asian-American women writers. It also examines gender issues in the work of canonical male authors-in print and on the stage. These lively, readable essays on American literature and culture range from explorations of feminist humor and chutzpah, to meditations on the personal and the political, to examinations of  feminists’ challenges to cultural paradigms that redline people like themselves.

“Feminist Engagements employs a feminist lens to re-view American writers and American culture from the nineteenth century through the beginning of our own twenty-first century. This book is excitingly intellectually engaged and, at the same time, movingly self-revelatory.  Every page is to be savored.”—Annette Kolodny, College of Humanities Professor Emerita of American Literature and Culture, the University of Arizona and author of The Lay of the Land, The Land Before Her, and Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty First Century.

“Because she has an appreciation of humor and of writing from the undergrounds of race, class, and gender, Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the perfect person to meditate on the contributions of black and Latino writers, unsung women writers, and those who transgress the conventional boundaries of literature. Her book is enormously valuable and great fun to read.”—Erica Jong, poet and novelist, author of twenty-two books including Love Comes First.