This chapter explores the post–World War II period in the United States, charting the postwar feminist essay in three directions: first, as a site of consciousness-raising during feminism’s second wave; second, as a space for feminist critiques of feminisms during the so-called third wave; and third, in its contemporary iteration in a revived consciousness-raising context: the #MeToo essay. The chapter draws together formally and contextually diverse texts into a longer conversation about how the essay can be read as a politicized and politicizing literary form. These texts include nonfiction subgenres often thought to be subordinate to the essay: an article, a collectively authored set of papers, a prose poem, a memoir, and a victim impact statement. The chapter argues that what makes these texts “feminist” and “essays” – despite significant formal differences – is their shared engagement with critical, documentary, and experiential literary modes and their stakes in connecting the individual to politically invested collectives, past and future. These five essays explicitly address gender and contingent forces of oppression that both bond and trouble emancipatory collectives.

This chapter examines how women’s writing has shaped the Australian novel. It suggests that the novel and women’s particular contributions to the form serve as significant flashpoints for discussions over the directions of the national culture. The chapter proceeds from the knowledge of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, an Indigenous woman of the Goenpul tribe, part of the Quandamooka nation: namely, that speaking about ‘women’ as though their presumed shared identities, experiences and representations ‘as Australians’ hinged on gender alone, has been a significant faultline in non-indigenous feminisms. Further, writings by Indigenous women underscore that ‘the novel’ is a freighted form that turns critical attention to the many strategies historically practised in Indigenous cultures and communities, that unsettle any presumption that ‘the novel’ (and indeed ‘the nation’) is a category or genre to be taken for granted. This chapter seeks to come to an understanding of how women’s novel writing in Australia is therefore a category of reception with complex histories and effects. It has a particular interest in the production and reception of ‘women’s novel writing’ in terms of the practices of individual authors; the creation of cultural and literary fields; complications of gendered identities; and the construction of readerships.

This chapter traces the influence of second-wave feminist activism, scholarship, and fiction in the US on women’s fiction of the 1990s. The first half examines a selection of literary texts published between the late 1960s and late 1980s that attest to the innovative techniques that women and genderqueer writers developed in this period to articulate feminist ideas, record the movement’s reception by the public, and recuperate aspects of American history long overlooked by a male-dominated academy. The second half turns to two novels by women published at the twentieth century’s close, both of which move between the 1990s and the previous six decades: Whitney Otto’s How to Make an American Quilt and Paule Marshall’s Daughters. The narrative strategies these novels use to challenge universalist accounts of history are revealed. These two novels featuring female protagonists who abandoned PhD projects dismissed as trivial by their white male supervisors are representative of a broader tendency in women’s fiction of the period, which is best approached as a repository for the historiographic narratives rejected by a white male-dominated academy.

I see feminism as a commitment to the full humanity of all women and all men, and a dismantling of the patriarchal values that inhibit this.

My essay is interested in David Foster Wallace’s complex and evolving relationship with feminism and the feminine, as well as in how this relationship has been figured over time within the literary community. This investigation involves an account of how critical practices surrounding Wallace have transformed over the past decade—from readings that take as universal the “human being” of Wallace’s work, instead of reading it as emblematic of a particular nexus of privileged observer-positions, to intersectional readings that acknowledge Wallace’s embodiment as a white middle-class American male whose work reflects that embodiment in important ways, to, finally, #MeToo-era readings that foreground the actual misogynistic violence inflicted by Wallace in his personal capacity, which, morally and politically, would seem to foreclose the possibility of further reading and set up an existential crisis for the burgeoning field of Wallace Studies.

As I engage with each of these critical approaches in my essay, three central questions emerge. First: How has the history of feminism in America shaped Wallace’s work and its reception? Second: If feminism is “a commitment to the full humanity of all women and all men,” where does Wallace’s empathy expand in this regard and where does it break down, on the page and in the flesh? Third: In our present historical moment, does acknowledging Wallace’s ultimate betrayal of this commitment in the form of his abuse mean a complete disavowal of the author and the man—an end to the conversation, as it were—or is there space for the #MeToo movement within Wallace Studies?

This chapter chronicles Canada’s emergence as a middle power on the global stage and as a champion of peacekeeping in the Cold War environment. Canadians meanwhile embraced a range of human rights legislation, engaged in an unprecedented outpouring of cultural expression; adopted a series of welfare state measures culminating in Medicare (1968); legislated bilingualism (1969) to accommodate the “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec; and implemented a policy of multiculturalism (1971) to integrate the influx of immigrants. The postwar liberal consensus began to fall apart with the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, which blunted economic growth. The Parti Québécois won the 1976 Quebec election, promising to hold a referendum on independence; Indigenous peoples vigorously challenged centuries of settler oppression; corporate agendas began to trump all other concerns; oil-rich Alberta mounted vigorous opposition to the 1980 National Energy Policy; and environmental degradation called into question the very survival of life on Earth. With the support of Quebec, Liberal governments remained in office federally for most of this period and Pierre Elliott Trudeau cemented his place in history in 1982 by “pratriating” the Constitution, which included a popular Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Quebec refused to sign the Constitution Act leading to a decade of fruitless constitutional negotiations.