Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewUnfinished 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 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: 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
