On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs / Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture (PDF)

MERRI LISA JOHNSON is Director of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies and an Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of South Carolina Upstate, USA.

SUSANNAH B. MINTZ is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of English at Skidmore College, USA.

'With the publication of this collection of critical essays, Johnson and Mintz confirm Nancy Mairs's place in both the intellectual histories of writing the body and in feminist literature about coming to voice. They have created a stirring critical milieu for Mairs's achingly embodied prose, charting her oeuvre with meticulous consideration. The editors and their contributors do homage not only to Mairs's subject position as a woman with disabilities, but also as a wife, mother, lover, social activist, poet, daughter, and more. Guided by Mairs's conviction that language has the capacity to effect change, the essays collected here explore the ways Mairs disrupts the fixed routes of our cultural narratives and widens the parameters of what can be said.' Janet Mason Ellerby, Professor of English, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and author of Intimate Reading: The Contemporary Women's Memoir and Following the Tambourine Man: A Birthmother's Memoir

'Nancy Mairs is not just a brilliant essayist; she is a valuable public intellectual with much to say about our present condition. As such, she deserves more critical attention than she has received to date. This welcome collection of essays, which explores her work from a variety of angles, illuminates the truth and beauty of her prose.' Tom Couser, Professor of English, Director of Disability Studies, Hofstra University