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Heroines
by Kate Zambreno
Published by Semiotext(e)
316p, b&w, softcover, 6"x9"
$17.95
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On the last day of December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called
Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with the female
modernists and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her
husband held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno’s blog became
an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates
of the modernist “wives and mistresses.” In her blog entries, Zambreno
reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot,
Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists
themselves who served as male writers’ muses only to end their lives
silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years,
Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community where today’s
“toxic girls” could devise a new feminist discourse, writing in the
margins and developing an alternative canon.
In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog
into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing
theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is
allowed to write it
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