On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs A Critical Anthology [Paperback]

Much of the existing scholarship on Nancy Mairs has approached her essays in the context of disability studies. This book seeks to broaden the conversation through a range of critical perspectives and with attention to underrepresented aspects of Mairs's oeuvre, demonstrating?her provocative combination of bold ethics and subtle aesthetics.Preface: Hello and Goodbye - Nancy Mairs PART I: INTRODUCTION; OR TWO WAYS IN On Writing toward Trust - Susannah Mintz On Feminist Intellectual History - Merri Lisa Johnson PART II: NEW ESSAYS On Difficult Gifts: A Biographical Portrait of Nancy Mairs - Hayley Mitchell Haugen On Writing in a Collaborative Spirit: Nancy Mairs's Ethic of Community - Susan Cumings On Depression Narratives: 'Hence, into the dark, we write . . .' - Hilary Clark On the Rhetoric of Gloom and Joy: In Turbulent Love with the World in A Troubled Guest - Susannah Mintz On Nancy's Husband George Masculinity, Disability, and Sex after Cancer in Remembering the Bone House and Waist High in the World - Margaret Torrell On Marriage, Church, and Being a Feminist Catholic Sacraments of the Body in Ordinary Time - Jenny Christine Bangsund PART III: FOUNDATIONAL STATEMENTS Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Life-writing - G. Thomas Couser 'Making up the Stories as We Go Along': Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability - Madonne Miner Transforming the Tale: The Auto/Body/ographies of Nancy Mairs - Susannah Mintz Dismembering the Heterosexual Imaginary: The Infidelity Narrative in Nancy Mairs's Remembering the Bone House - Merri Lisa Johnson

'With the publication of this collection of critical essays, Johnson and Mintz confirm Nancy Mairs's place in both the intellectual histories of writing the body and in feminist literature about coming to voice. They have created a stirring critical milieu for Mairs's achingly embodied prose, charting her oeuvre with meticulous consideration. The editors and their contributors do homage not only to Mairs's subject positiolsÐ