Contents -- Acknowledgments -- For Love and Glory, by Way of a Preface -- Introduction -- Historical Overview -- The Sympathetic Magic of Genre: Hybrids, Creoles, Mongrels, and Contagions -- Laundry: Cyclical Mythic Structure in Women's Epic -- Laundry, Myth, and Modernity -- Psyche: Internalized Mythic Structure in Women's Epic -- Oral Culture and Women's Performance -- Making It Up Out of Whole Cloth: Textual Textiles and Textilist Readings of Epic -- Invisible Child: Anonymous Was a Woman and Other Stories -- Tomboy Epic: Epics of Girlhood -- Fathers' Daughters: Against the Fathers' Amnesia -- My Mother, Myself: Symbiotic Recursions in Women's Epic -- Exits and Entrances: Monumental Time in Women's Epic -- Ironing Things Out: Cyclical Time in Women's Epic -- My Woman-Naming Roar: Feminist Discourse and Women's Epic -- Divine Machinery: The Gods and Religious Thought in Women's Epic -- It Gets Hard Core: Materialist Girls -- Mowing the Lawn: Democratic, Inclusive Goals in Women's Epic -- Small Dynasties: The Local, Familial, and Global in Women's Epic -- The Heroic Text: Poetry as Heroic Action -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Primary Bibliography and Checklist of Women's Epic Poetry -- Secondary Bibliography -- Index.