#MeToo and Literary Studies

Literature has always recorded a history of patriarchy, sexual violence, and resistance. Academics have been using literature to expose and critique this violence and domination for half a century. But the continued potency of #MeToo after its 2017 explosion adds new urgency and wider awareness about these issues, while revealing new ways in which rape culture shapes our everyday lives. This intersectional guide helps readers, students, teachers, and scholars face and challenge our culture of sexual violence by confronting it through the study of literature. #MeToo and Literary Studies gathers essays on literature from Ovid to Carmen Maria Machado, by academics working across the United States and around the world, who offer clear ways of using our reading, teaching, and critical practices to address rape culture and sexual violence. It also examines the promise and limitations of the #MeToo movement itself, speaking to the productive use of social media as well as to the voices that the movement has so far muted. In uniting diverse voices to enable the #MeToo movement to reshape literary studies, this book is also committed to the idea that the way we read and write about literature can make real change in the world.

"#MeToo is a powerful hashtag, rallying cry, and cudgel. But lasting change requires association, deep thinking, and nuance—and for that, we turn to literature. #MeToo and Literary Studies beautifully demonstrates how writers have been describing the realities of sexual violence for decades, and how literary analysis can help provoke meaningful transformation of rape culture., This collection of timely, wide-ranging, and diverse essays demonstrates the power of #MeToo to reframe prior debates and silences in literary studies. The editors make a compelling case for #MeToo storytelling as part of a long history of representing sexual violence in literature. The essays interweave literary studies, social activism, and pedagogy in generative new readings. #MeToo and Literary Studies is essential reading and invaluable equipment for scholars, teachers, and students engaging with rape culture, misogyny, and literature., The essays in this exciting collection by a diverse group of feminist scholars make the case that the study of literature is also a performance of activism. #MeToo and Literary Studies maps representations of rape culture across geographies both local and global, and wide-ranging texts from communities subjected to sexual violence. The book persuasively demonstrates how literature freshly analyzed through critically engaged writing and innovative pedagogies can lead to radical social change. A crucial anthology for our dark times. , Fighting rape culture starts with making it visible. #Metoo and Literary Studies does that and so much more. It uses literature to expose the cultural normalization of sexual violence and finds in pedagogy the building blocks necessary to produce a viable alternative. It is scholarly activism at its best., Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett's #MeToo and Literary Studies is a tour de force, a groundbreaking gathering of feminist scholars who have committed themselves to exposing, contextualizing, and challenging the ongoing trauma of sexual violence in popular culture and literature. Spanning antiquity to our current age, this book maps how artists, activists, and academics have both grappled with the devastating reality of sexual assault, while also imagining beyond the trauma and giving us a collective way forward. #MeToo and Literary Studies is an urgent, transformative, and mandatory read.

Mary K. Holland is Professor of English at The State University of New York at New Paltz, USA. She is the author of The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Succeeding Postmodernism (Bloomsbury, 2013), and co-editor, with Stephen J. Burn, of Approaches to Teaching David Foster Wallace (2019). Heather Hewett is Associate Professor and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an affiliate of the English Department at The State University of New York at New Paltz, USA. Her work on feminism, gender, and contemporary literature has been published in scholarly journals and edited collections as well as mainstream and literary publications.