Augustana Professor’s Book on the shelves

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Dylan Anderson

Roxanne Harde’s Narratives of Community:Women’s Short Story Sequences brings together a collection of essays from around the world.

When Roxanne Harde wrote an essay for a pedagogical journal and published it, she thought “I’m not the only one who can do this. Why don’t I put out a call for paper.”

That thought led to Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences.  The book is a collection of essays discussing short story sequences and how their female authors consider community in fiction. Spanning different time periods, countries, racial backgrounds, and ethnic communities, Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences explores the idea of community in its various forms and the role women play in creating their community.

“I have authors from England, France, the United States and Canada working on texts from all over the world. There’s Egyptian, African American, South American texts included. All of them speak about women and society.”

The collection includes texts from Gloria Naylor’s Brewster’s Place, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, Alice Munro’s The Lives of Girls and Women, to Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.
The inspiration for the collection came from Sandra Zagarell’s theoretical essay Narrative of Community. Zagarell’s approach explains how women writers often use a narrative style that supports the literary creation of women in  community. Zagarell herself is one of the 21 contributing authors to Harde’s collection.

Published in December 2007, the book has already garnered positive reviews, extolling the collection as a major contribution to the study of literature and women’s studies.

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