Unfinished Spirit
Muriel Rukeyser's Twentieth Century
Published on 15. March 2022
Book
Hardback
228 pages
978-1-5017-6232-1 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the Matei Calinescu Prize
In Unfinished Spirit, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein brings to light the extraordinary archive of Muriel Rukeyser's (1913-1980) unpublished and incomplete literary works, revealing the ways in which misogyny influences the kinds of texts we read and value. Despite her status today as an influential poet, much of Rukeyser's critical and feminist writing remained unfinished, suppressed by the sexism of editors, political censure, the withdrawal of funding and publishing contracts, as well the conditions of single motherhood and economic precarity.
From Savage Coast, her novel of the Spanish Civil War (which Kennedy-Epstein recovered, edited, and published to great acclaim in 2013) to her photo-text collaboration with Berenice Abbott, essays on women writers, radio scripts, and biographies, Unfinished Spirit traces the creation, reception, and rejection of Rukeyser's most ambitious texts-works that continued the radical, avant-garde project of modernism and challenged an increasingly hegemonic Cold War culture. Bound together by Rukeyser's radical vision of artistic creation and political engagement, these incomplete texts open a space to theorize the politics of the unfinished for understanding women's artistic production, reasserting the importance of the archive as a primary site of feminist criticism.
In Unfinished Spirit, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein brings to light the extraordinary archive of Muriel Rukeyser's (1913-1980) unpublished and incomplete literary works, revealing the ways in which misogyny influences the kinds of texts we read and value. Despite her status today as an influential poet, much of Rukeyser's critical and feminist writing remained unfinished, suppressed by the sexism of editors, political censure, the withdrawal of funding and publishing contracts, as well the conditions of single motherhood and economic precarity.
From Savage Coast, her novel of the Spanish Civil War (which Kennedy-Epstein recovered, edited, and published to great acclaim in 2013) to her photo-text collaboration with Berenice Abbott, essays on women writers, radio scripts, and biographies, Unfinished Spirit traces the creation, reception, and rejection of Rukeyser's most ambitious texts-works that continued the radical, avant-garde project of modernism and challenged an increasingly hegemonic Cold War culture. Bound together by Rukeyser's radical vision of artistic creation and political engagement, these incomplete texts open a space to theorize the politics of the unfinished for understanding women's artistic production, reasserting the importance of the archive as a primary site of feminist criticism.
Reviews / Votes
Unfinished Spirit is a bracing work of scholarly devotion. Alongside plenty of original readings and fresh interpretation, Kennedy-Epstein manages the uncanny trick of presenting us with Rukeyser at work, thinking and feeling her way through the catastrophes of her epoch. The reader comes away from the book enlivened and encouraged and enraged.(Women: A Cultural Review) Adventurous, painstaking, and thought-provoking, Unfinished Spirit will draw students of Rukeyser and twentieth-century American culture to think outside familiar literary historical boxes.
(Modern Philology) Rukeyser's intervention in modernism with this avant-garde novel-and the obstruction of her career by misogynist expectations for women writers-are increasingly the focus of scholars eager to work on something new about the modernist novel and/or the Spanish Civil War.
(Feminist Modernist Studies) A work of bold originality and personal, passionate scholarship Rukeyser's archival writing provides an invaluable perspective on our times and a guide to moving forward (particularly in our era of revived book banning) with her characteristic belief in possibility, in process and potential.
(The Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive) The importance of Kennedy-Epstein's archival research and recovery of Rukeyser's unpublished and unfinished work cannot be overstated. Unfinished Spirit will be essential to the study of Rukeyser and to left women's writing going forward.
(Against the Current) What Rukeyser did for others-speaking on their behalf, calling their work and their lives to the surface of consciousness-the editors seek to do for her. In The Muriel Rukeyser Era, they revive Rukeyser, and with her, offer a reminder of her times.
(Textual Cultures)
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Ithaca
United States
Product notice
Paper over boards
Illustrations
13 b&w halftones - 13 Halftones, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
499 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5017-6232-1 (9781501762321)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
03/2022
Cornell University Press
€18.49
Available for download
Person
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein is Professor of gender studies and twentieth- and twenty-first-century women's writing at the University of Bristol. She is the coeditor of The Muriel Rukeyser Era and author of a forthcoming biography of Rukeyser, Mother of Us All. Follow her on X at @rowena_k_e.
Content
Introduction: Waste/Archives/Feminism
Part I: Novel Proliferations: The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1974
1. Costa Brava
2. Her Symbol Was Civil War: Recovering Savage Coast
3. Mother of Exiles: Spanish Civil War Writing
Part II: Being Process Itself: Feminism, Collaboration, and Influence
4. Bad Influence and Willful Subjects: The Life of Poetry, "Many Keys," and Sunday at Nine
5. So Easy to See: The Unfinished Collaboration with Berenice Abbott
6. Pillars of Process: Franz Boas, Birth, and Indigenous Thought
Conclusion: The Rukeyser Era
Part I: Novel Proliferations: The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1974
1. Costa Brava
2. Her Symbol Was Civil War: Recovering Savage Coast
3. Mother of Exiles: Spanish Civil War Writing
Part II: Being Process Itself: Feminism, Collaboration, and Influence
4. Bad Influence and Willful Subjects: The Life of Poetry, "Many Keys," and Sunday at Nine
5. So Easy to See: The Unfinished Collaboration with Berenice Abbott
6. Pillars of Process: Franz Boas, Birth, and Indigenous Thought
Conclusion: The Rukeyser Era