Judith Fetterley, whose first book, The Resisting Reader , has become a classic of feminist criticism, has also published a second book, Provisions , in which she shifts her attention from male texts to those by women, in this instance, neglected nineteenth-century American women writers. Fetterley's current research involves work on woman regionalists from 1850-1920, an anthology to be published by Norton Press. She is also working on an experimental critical text, interweaving a reading of the texts with personal narrative. Out of her research has come a new course she will teach, on mothering and reading. Another woman in the Department working on Charlotte Perkins Gilman is Denise Knight, who has received tentative permission from the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in the United States at Radcliffe College to edit the diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Final permission awaits the determination that no one else is working on the same project.
Knight is also seeking permission from Radcliffe to edit for publication an unpublished volume of Gilman's poetry, compiled by her long-time friend Amy Wellington. And I'm concerned that such paradigms as the one these authors propose, relatively static and reductive as they inevitably are, so easily become prescriptive. Barbara McCaskill has been invited to submit an essay for Style which will include an evaluation of current feminist approaches to stylistics. Her essay will consider race as a function of stylistics in feminist literary criticism, linguistic strategies, and such other forms of critical discourse as narratology and deconstruction. Her discussion will be included in the 1989 Bibliography number of Style .