"What is a classic? Is a classic a book that stays in print? Who decides what stays in print, what gets remaindered, what makes it into paperback, onto the supermarket displays, back into hardbound collected works? Alice Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was out of print for seven years. It didn't change. By what mechanism is it now available in paperback? Pat Parker's Movement In Black is out of print, as is Barbara Deming's work. How might their work come back to us? By their deaths? "Discovery" by an influential critic? In fact, much of the work of Aphra Behn, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Angelina Weld Grimké, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, H.D., and others, was out of print or hard to come by prior to the second wave of feminism (and who knew that all of these women loved women!) Is this work classic now, but not then? Can we only talk about classics after a suitable passage of time?"
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Essayists from the United StatesJews from the United StatesWomen academics from the United States20th-century poets from the United StatesWomen activists from the United States
Original Language: English
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Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (September 9, 1945 – July 10, 2018) was a Jewish American essayist, poet, academic, and political activist against racism and for economic and social justice who lived in the USA.
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