Thursday, January 14, 6:30pm
Rose Gallery
41 Cooper Square, Lower Level 1
Free and open to the general public

Believing that we must fully integrate the contribution of women into our American literary heritage, acclaimed author Elaine Showalter gives a talk at Cooper Union based on her recent book A Jury of Her Peers. The fascinating narrative features more than 250 female writers. These include not only famous and expected names (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O'Connor, Gwendolyn Brooks, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, and Jodi Picoult, to name a few), but also many who were once successful and acclaimed yet now are little known such as Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Susan Glaspell. Showalter shows how these writers—both the enduring stars and the ones left behind by the canon—were connected to one another and to their times. 

Elaine Showalter is an award winning literary critic, feminist and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia who coined the term "Gynocriticism," the historical study of women writers as a distinct literary tradition, in her essay "Toward a Feminist Poetics." Showalter's best known works are Toward a Feminist Poetics (1979), The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture (1830-1980) (1985), Sexual Anarchy: Gender at Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990), Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997), and Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001). In 2007 Showalter was chair of the judges for the prestigious British literary award, the Man Booker International Prize.