Liberating Literature is, primarily, a bold and revealing book about feminist writers, readers, and texts. But is is also much more than that. Within this volume Maria Lauret manages to look with fresh vision at the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s; socialist women's writing of the 1930s; the emergence of the New Left; and the second wave women's movement and its cultural practices. Lauret's historicisation of feminist political writing allows for a new definition of the genre, and enables her to illuminate the profound influence and importance of African-American women's writing. Well-grounded historically and theoretically, Liberating Literature speaks about and to a political and cultural tradition, and offers stunning new readings of both familiar and neglected novels within the feminist canon. Reader and students of feminist fiction cannot afford to be without this major new work.