From Library Journal
Noted critic Robinson brings her feminist outlook to bear in this selection of the over 560 women writers who lived and worked mainly in this century. "Modern" is a marker of time (from 1900 on) and not an indication of style, so the writers in these volumes are not necessarily modernist or postmodernist. Authors range in their "modern" sensibilities from the frequently anthologized Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin, through the equally canonical and differently "modern" Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou, and Ann Petry, to lesser-known writers such as Viola Meynell and Emily Nasrallah. The women represented here are primarily literary writers, but there is also a fair representation of genre writers and those whose work is recorded in letters, diaries, or journals. The women represent both the contemporary avant-garde of feminism and those who wrote outside any overt political considerations. Writers from Western Europe and America are joined by those from Eastern Europe, Africa, Central and South America, and the Pacific. The four volumes are arranged in alphabetical order by the author's last name and are headed with her name, dates, and country of origin. The excerpts (ranging from short paragraphs to over two pages) are chronological by date of publication unless a different organization would outline a critical debate about a particular author. At least two but often more excerpts are included. The criticism is taken from a variety of sources, including journals, newspapers, and books. Some entries in Gale's annual Contemporary Literary Criticism or Twentieth Century Literary Criticism will provide the user with more in-depth material, but these sources cannot cover as wide a range of women authors as does Robinson's work. While it is of little practical value when treating writers who have already found a place in the canon, it is a very useful starting point for exploring the critical reception of still marginalized women writers and is therefore recommended for academic libraries.?Neal Wyatt, formerly with Mary Washington Coll. Lib., Fredricksberg, Va.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Other volumes in the Library of Literary Criticism series (originally published by Moulton) have been devoted to genre or nationality and language. This latest in the series, with gender as a focus, follows the established format--reprinting selections of critical writings about authors. Modern women writers are defined as those who lived and worked in the twentieth century. The 570 covered include those working in popular genres such as detective novels and science fiction as well as forms such as autobiography, diaries, and journals. The volumes are arranged in alphabetical order by author, noting nationality and birth and death dates, but no other biographical information. The selections of critical commentary are presented chronologically, which can give an interesting perspective on an author's critical reception. The source for many of the entries is the other volumes in the series, with updating of critical sources. The editor, a professor of English at East Carolina University, notes in the introduction that she also used other standard sources to select nominees. An examination of any effort like this one will reveal omissions--where is well-known memoirist and culinary writer M. F. K. Fisher or Trinidadian Rosa Guy? Of twentieth-century Spanish women poets, why include Gloria Fuertes but not Carmen Conde, the first woman elected to the Spanish Royal Academy?
There will always be some debate in libraries weighing the value of providing excerpts of literary criticism as opposed to teaching users to retrieve information from original sources. There is also the reality that many small libraries will not have the original scholarly sources excerpted. Leaving aside those considerations, the merits of this set and the series as a whole are most comparable to Gale's Contemporary Literary Criticism and Twentieth Century Literary Criticism as well as spin-off genre or ethnic volumes such as Hispanic Literature Criticism. The Gale series provides an introduction to each author with biographical information, notation of major works, and a summary of critical reception. The Gale excerpts of critical works are longer and greater in number, although Modern Women Writers draws more exclusively from scholarly sources. There is obviously much duplication in the women included, but each includes writers omitted from the other, and there is not tremendous overlap in the critical sources selected. For many women writers, there are more recent critical works cited here. The Argentine novelist Luisa Valenzuela, for example, was last treated in CLC in 1985, with critical selections dated from 1974 to 1984. In MWW, the selections range from 1988 to 1992. One interesting note: several of the excerpts in CLC were more mixed in their appraisal of Valenzuela's work than any that were selected for MWW.
Citation information is a major problem with MWW. Although information on book sources is complete, for citations to articles in journals, the article title is not given, only the author, periodical title, and volume and page number. Although one could still usually track down the source, this is not standard bibliographic style. Some of the selections were translated from the original language of the source, but no indication of this is given. Since the article title is not cited, it may not be clear to the reader that they are hunting up a source in another language. The titles of works discussed are inconsistently presented when the original is in another language. Sometimes the title is given in the original language with a translation in parentheses, other times in English alone or in only the original language. An index of critics is appended. Given the emphasis the editor places on international inclusiveness, it would have been useful to include an index of authors by nationality.
Whether a library that subscribes to the Gale literary criticism series needs this addition is a judgment call based on cost and demand. MWW pulls together recent criticism on close to 600 women writers and will certainly receive use in public and academic libraries.
