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The ten stories gathered here show Rebecca Harding Davis to be an acute observer of the conflicts and ambiguities of a divided nation and position her as a major transitional writer between romanticism and realism. Capturing the fluctuating cultural environment of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, the stories explore such issues as racial prejudice and slavery, the loneliness and powerlessness of women, and the effects of postwar market capitalism on the working classes. Davis’s characters include soldiers and civilians, men and women, young and old, blacks and whites. Instead of focusing (like many writers of the period) on major conflicts and leaders, Davis takes readers into the in...
Appalachia has long been stereotyped as a region of feuds, moonshine stills, mine wars, environmental destruction, joblessness, and hopelessness. Robert Schenkkan's 1992 Pulitzer-Prize winning play The Kentucky Cycle once again adopted these stereotypes, recasting the American myth as a story of repeated failure and poverty--the failure of the American spirit and the poverty of the American soul. Dismayed by national critics' lack of attention to the negative depictions of mountain people in the play, a group of Appalachian scholars rallied against the stereotypical representations of the region's people. In Back Talk from Appalachia, these writers talk back to the American mainstream, confr...
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What would it be like to navigate this life under the shadow of a deadly disease? How would you cope, both physically and psychologically? Approximately 30,000 people in our country live with the devastating illness, cystic fibrosis, and one in twenty Caucasians are carriers of its gene. Many among us are affected by CF, but few really know much about it. "David's Promise" delivers an in-depth examination of a young man's life-long confrontation with cystic fibrosis. Through the fictional main character of David, the reader is given a deeply personal chance to experience love's ultimate triumph over illness. The story explores all the complexities of David's life, and as each layer unfolds, the reader begins to look beyond David's medical diagnosis and into his heart. The young man is a teacher with a pregnant wife and a whole slew of struggles, including the implications of genetic testing, the question of abortion, and denial of medical insurance coverage in this country. This novel does not pull any punches concerning the stark realities of cystic fibrosis, yet it was written to offer hope and understanding about an often hopeless and misunderstood disease.
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A writer of fiction, literary criticism, travel narratives and libretti, E M Forster is best known for his beautifully-structured novels which held a mirror up to the English class system. This fascinating collection of diaries, travel journals and itineraries brings together all unpublished material Forster wrote which can be classed as ‘memoir’.
Disturbing the Nest assesses the future of the family as an institution through an historical and comparative analysis of the nature, causes, and social implications of family change in advanced western societies such as the United States, New Zealand, and Switzerland by focusing on the one society in which family decline is found to be the greatest, Sweden. The founding of the modern Swedish welfare state was based in large part on the belief that it was necessary for the state to intervene in society in order to improve the situation of the family. Of great concern was the low birthrate, which was seen as a threat to the very survival of Swedes as a national population group. The Social De...
Rebecca Harding Davis was a prominent author of radical social fiction during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In stories that combine realism with sentimentalism, Davis confronted a wide range of contemporary American issues, giving voice to working women, prostitutes, wives seeking divorce, celibate utopians, and female authors. Davis broke down distinctions between the private and the public worlds, distinctions that trapped women in the ideology of domesticity.By engaging current strategies in literary hermeneutics with a strong sense of historical radicalism in the Gilded Age, Jean Pfaelzer reads Davis through the public issues that she forcefully inscribed in her fiction. In this study, Davis's realistic narratives actively construct a coherent social work, not in a fictional vacuum but in direct engagement with the explosive movements of social change from the Civil War through the turn of the century.
This work explores the quantitative and qualitative development of homicide in eastern Finland in the second half of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth. The area studied comprised northern Savo and northern Karelia in eastern Finland. At that time, these were completely agricultural regions on the periphery of the kingdom of Sweden. Indeed the majority of the population still got their living from burn-beating agriculture. The analysis of homicide there reveals characteristics that were exceptional by Western European standards: the large proportion of premeditated homicides (murders) and those within the family is more reminiscent of modern cities in the West than ...
Rebecca Harding Davis was a prolific writer who published chiefly in popular periodicals over the latter half of the nineteenth century. In tales that combine realism with sentimentalism and in topical essays, Davis confronted a wide range of current issues—notably women’s problems—as one who knew the frustration caused by the genteel female’s helpless social position and barriers against women entering the working world. In an excellent critical introduction, Jean Pfaelzer integrates cultural, historical, and psychological approaches in penetrating readings of Davis’s work. She emphasizes how Davis’s fictional embrace of the commonplace was instrumental in the demise of American...