Radicals, Volume 1: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama: Audacious Writings by American Women, 1830-1930 Volume 1

By Roxane Gay

Kate Chopin on pot smoking. Pauline Hopkins on alchemy and the undead. Sui Sin Far on cross-dressing. Emma Lazarus and Angelina Weld Grimké on lesbian longing. Julia Ward Howe on intersexuality. Perhaps the first of its kind,

Radicals is a two-volume collection of writings by American women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special attention paid to the voices of Black, Indigenous, and Asian American women.

In Volume 1: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, selections span from early works like Sarah Louise Forten's anti-slavery poem "The Grave of the Slave" (1831) and Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall (1855), a novel about her struggle to break into the male-dominated field of journalism, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's revenge fantasy, "When I Was a Witch" (1910) and Georgia Douglas Johnson's poem on the fraught nature of African American motherhood, "Maternity" (1922). In between, readers will discover many vibrant and challenging lesser-known texts that are rarely collected today. Some, indeed, have been out of print for more than a century.

Unique among anthologies of American literature, Radicals undoes such silences by collecting the underrepresented, the uncategorizable, the unbowed--powerful writings by American women of genius and audacity who looked toward, and wrote toward, what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called "a lifted world."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 160938766X
• ISBN13: 9781609387662
• Release Date: June 2021
• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"