they entered the textual dialoguewith their male contemporaries and with women in other cultures.

Women's writing in the 20th century has been the focus of steady and growing interest

, it is clear that women writers did not identify with the master narratives of nationalism

signed by women were published both in book form and in that quintessential 19th-century literary space-the periodical press.

women came to be highly valued as special creatures who, by virtue of their “natural” purity and moral strength,

colonial literature was largely produced by men and addressed to a male audience

the entry of women into public discourse after three centuries of virtual intellectual anonymity.

trace the raising of the heroine’s consciousness and often have the effect of doing the same for their female reader

distinctions between the analytical and the creative, the political and the aesthetic were constantly blurred

History has not been kind to feminist literary criticism of the 1970s.

the aesthetic values that have always seemed to find women’s writing lacking.

we are not learning what women have felt and experienced, but only what men have thought women should be’

the American canon is largely unreadable for women

‘literary history and the present are dark with silences’, one of which is the writing of women

they are working with few resources, within a largely antagonistic field and without the benefit of antecedents.

She saw literature as a key location for the creation, expression and maintenance of a sexual politics that oppressed women

women authors are barely mentioned and, where they are, it is usually in a footnote

literary representations of women come mostly from the pens of men

a long history of laws, precepts, ideologies, institutional and cultural practices – all, she believes, created and sustained by men.

And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so untrustworthy, a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a country unable to face why so many of the nonwhite are in prison, or on the needle, or standing, futureless, in the streets — it may very well be that both the child, and his elder, have concluded that they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed to learn so little

here was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today. He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long.

A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.

If two black people, at that bitter hour of the world's history, had been able to speak to each other, the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted as long as it did.

Beat to his socks, which was once the black's most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed into a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed of uptight, middle‐class white people, imitating poverty, trying to get down, to get with it, doing their thing, doing their despairing best to be funky, which we, the blacks, never dreamed of doing — we were funky, baby, like funk was going out of style.

There have been, and are, times, and places, when to speak a certain language could be dangerous, even fatal.

It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, in her novel Iola Leroy (1892), had used AAVE for the speech of some of her characters and SE for the speech of other African- American characters, signaling differences in status and class through these linguistic differences.

Typically, these narratives used highly stereotyped written representations of the phonics and syntax of AAVE, intended to portray the speakers as not only poorly educated but also unintelligent.

Had the authors used AAVE, their readers might have been tempted to disregard their words as the utterances of someone unlike them, perhaps even someone less deserving of liberty, humane treatment, and civil rights.

as in the 1996 decision of the Oakland, California, School Board resolution, “AAVE is neither slang nor incorrect language. Linguistically speaking, there is no such thing as incorrect language, because as long as someone is talking and is being understood by the person listening, communication occurs between speaker and listener-making language neither wrong nor right”

By the late 1700s, it was illegal for enslaved people to be taught to read or write in most of the states where slavery remained legal.

Their rich literature was passed along from person to person and generation to generation through the oral tradition.