ENG 253: Women's Literature

Welcome, English 253 students. This guide will provide you with Library resources that support your course Studies in Women's Literature: Write/Right to Belong: American Women in Fiction from 1830 to Present and your literary analysis essay. From the menus, you'll find sample searches; topical books and ebooks; links to scholarly journal articles; instructions on how to search for articles; and more. 

Zora Neale Hurston. Nov 1937. [Photograph]. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/00652433

This course will survey a wide range of women’s literature across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries written in the United States with a concentration on fiction—especially short stories and two novels toward the end of the semester. An occasional nonfiction essay may make a cameo. The chosen theme of “write/right to belong” speaks to all the texts as the authors, characters, and even readers search for ways to write one’s belonging into existence while advocating for the right to belong. This could refer to citizenship, the public sphere, the literary world, within one’s family, within one’s geographical area, or even within one’s sense of self. Where do women “belong”? Where does women’s literature “belong”? How do these authors confront exclusionary tactics and imposed limitations with their fiction?

McGunigal, L. (2025) Studies in Women's Literature: Write/Right to Belong: American Women in Fiction from 1830 to Present [Syllabus] Missouri Southern State University