In Conversation: On Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination

Sandra M. Gilbert is a distinguished literary critic, poet, and professor emerita at the University of California, Davis. She is also the author of Judgment Day: Poems, and co-author – with Susan Gubar – of the classic feminist text The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Forty years after collaborating on that groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, Gilbert and Gubar map the literary history of feminism’s second wave in Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination (W. W. Norton & Company). Together they trace the evolution of feminist literature from its stirrings in the midcentury – when Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan, and Joan Didion found their voices and Diane di Prima, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde discovered community in rebellion – to a resurgence in the new millennium with the writings of Alison Bechdel, Claudia Rankine, and N. K. Jemisin. Gilbert and Gubar offer lucid, compassionate, and piercing readings of major works, and examine the overlapping terrain of literature and politics in a comprehensive portrait of an expanding movement.

Susan Gubar is a memoirist, literary critic, and professor emerita at Indiana University. She is the author of Late-Life Love: A Memoir; the co-editor, with Sandra M. Gilbert, of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English; and co-author, again with Gilbert, of the classic feminist text The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Forty years after collaborating on that groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, Gilbert and Gubar map the literary history of feminism’s second wave in Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination (W. W. Norton & Company). Together they trace the evolution of feminist literature from its stirrings in the midcentury – when Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan, and Joan Didion found their voices and Diane di Prima, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde discovered community in rebellion – to a resurgence in the new millennium with the writings of Alison Bechdel, Claudia Rankine, and N. K. Jemisin. Gilbert and Gubar offer lucid, compassionate, and piercing readings of major works, and examine the overlapping terrain of literature and politics in a comprehensive portrait of an expanding movement.