TEXTS

Texts will be available at Wild Iris Bookstore.
The articles and excerpts listed will be included in a Custom Copies course pack which will also be available at Goerings.
Click here to order Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl.


Grammar Handbook

Hacker, Diana. A Writer’s Reference. 4th ed.


Primary Texts

A Stitch in Time: Origins/Herstory of Quilts
  • Alice Walker's "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens"
  • Katherine Anne Porter's "The Old Order"

A Different Sort of Reading: Subversive Knowledges in Quilts
  • Elizabeth Gaspell's "Trifles"
  • Adrienne Rich's "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"
  • Alice Nelson-Dunbar's "I Sit and Sew" 981 in Literature and Society

Stitching the Bonds Among Women
  • Cathy Song's "The Grammar of Silk" 568-569 in Making Literature Matter
  • How to Make an American Quilt(movie)

Quilt as Artifact
  • Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"
  • Melvin Dixon's "Aunt Ida Pieces a Quilt" 145-147 in Brother to Brother

Text as Quilt
  • Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace
  • Elaine Showalter's "Piecing and Writing" from Nancy K. Miller's The Poetics of Gender

Contemporary Quilts (the Materially Literary)
  • Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl
  • L. Frank Baum's The Patchwork Girl of Oz (novel and movie)
  • Shelley Jackson's "Stitch Bitch"
  • Lisa's LAE site about Patchwork Girl - perhaps useful in showing what an "academic" website does


Secondary Texts



The following texts are designed to provide a historical and material background into the art and craft of quilting. Finley and Webster's books are the first attempts by women writers/quilters to historicize and formalize the idea of quiltmaking as "traditional" craft. Holstein's introduction, on the other hand, is part of an attempt in the 1970s to recognize quilts as "art." Showalter and Parker question the process and the agency of the quilters themselves, attempting to politically and socialy historicize the fabrics of oppression, repression, and suppression that were woven into any quilted object. Cogswell and Hedges' articles help us to examine the quilt as an artifact of such women quilters: what were the quilters' economic and personal struggles? How are these challenges a part of their quilts?


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University of Florida
Copyright 2002

Lisa Hager