Since 1974, the Florence Howe Award has honored distinguished feminist literary criticism written by scholars in the fields of language and literature study. Seventeen winning essays-many never before published-are collected in one volume, Courage and Tools. Written by leading scholars and theorists, these groundbreaking essays discuss topics such as resistance to the patriarchal order and the development of a feminist literary theory and explore the works of writers such as Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Henry James, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, and Alexander Pope.