Heroines

-I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order - pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature-

On the last day of December 2009 Kate Zambreno, then an unpublished writer, began a blog arising from her obsession with literary modernism. Widely shared on social media, Zambreno-s blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants and melancholy portraits of the fates of the modernist -wives and mistresses,- reclaiming the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers- muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, her blog helped create a community of writers and devised a new feminist discourse of writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.

In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic she began online into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it - she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles feminine experience to the realm of the -minor,- and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. -ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it-s pathological,- writes Zambreno. -When he does, it-s existential.-

With Heroines, Zambreno provided a model for a newly subjectivized criticism, prefiguring many group biographies and forms of autotheory and hybrid memoirs that were to come in the years to follow.