The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers considers the important literary, historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts of American women authors from the seventeenth century to the present and provides readers with an analysis of current literary trends and debates in women's literature.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Across the Atlantic: Women in British North America
• 2 Rhetoric and revolution: The women writers of the new republic
• 3 Sentimental poets and scribbling women: The writers of the early nineteenth century
• 4 From True Woman to New Woman: Redefining womanhood at the turn of the century
• 5 Clashes with modernity: Women writers between the world wars
• 6 Literatures of witness: Women writers after 1945
• Coda: The literatures of the twenty-first century
• Works cited