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Of Lovely Tyrants and Invisible Women
This book examines images of female illness and invalidism as a metaphor of women's position of invisibility in Victorian and fin-de-siecle America, which pervade the fiction of the Virginia writer Ellen Glasgow (Richmond, 1873-1945). The study contends that the author explores the Victorian cult of invalidism to reveal the mechanisms of patriarchy: her novels warn against adhering to its values, since women are moulded to become epitomes of extreme delicacy and selflessness, being ultimately reduced to virtual inexistence. Many times physically incapacitating, Glasgow seems to suggest, the doctrine of female self-effacement always debilitates women's autonomy as human beings. The female invalids in Glasgow's fiction thus operate as uncanny mirrors of the self women become if they adhere to the traditional code of femininity and its adjoining principle of self-sacrifice.
Ellen Glasgow
Using a variety of critical approaches - including semiotic, intertextual, and biographical - these fifteen essays cover the full range of Glasgow's writings, from well-known novels such as Virginia, Barren Ground, and The Sheltered Life to less familiar works such as The Battle-Ground, The Wheel of Life, the verse collected in The Freeman and Other Poems, and the short stories.
The Ages of Life
The binary construction of »young« and »old«, which is based on a biogerontological model of aging as decline, can be redefined as the ambiguity of aging from a cultural studies perspective. This concept enables an analysis of the social functions of images of aging with the aim of providing a basis for interdisciplinary exchange on gerontological research. The articles in this publication conceive the relationship between living and aging as a productive antagonism which focuses on the interplay between continuity and change as a marker of life course identity: aging and growing older are processes which cannot be reduced to the chronology of years but which are shaped by the individual's interaction with the changing circumstances of life.
Between the Angle and the Curve
In this study, Russell explores the ways in which Willa Cather and Toni Morrison subvert the textual expectations of gendered geography and push against the boundaries of the official canon. As Russell demonstrates, the unique depictions Cather and Morrison create of the American landscape challenge existing assertions about American fiction. Specifically, Russell argues that looking at the intimate connections between space, gender, race, and identity as they play out in the fiction of Cather and Morrison refutes the myth of a unified American landscape and thus opens up the territory of American fiction.
Gloria Naylor
"This collection of essays treats Gloria Naylor's novels Mama Day and Bailey's Cafe, recognized by scholars and critics as her most significant works. Long understood to be a major African-American woman writer, Gloria Naylor is finally gaining recognition as a contemporary American writer who needs no qualifiers or adjectives before her name. One of the few critical studies of her work, this text represents the work of a group of scholars who are looking seriously and carefully at Naylor, attempting to determine her place, not within an intellectual tradition, but rather within several traditions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The Wilderness Within
America's literature is notably marked by a preoccupation with the spiritual quest. Questing heroes from Huck Finn to Nick Adams have undertaken solitary journeys that pull them away from family and society and into a transformative wilderness that brings them to a new understanding of the spiritual world. Women, however, have not often been portrayed as questing heroes. Bound to home and community, they have been more frequently cast as representatives of that stifling world from which the hero is compelled to flee. Are women in American literary texts thus excluded from spiritual experience? Kristina K. Groover, in examining this question, finds that books by American women writers offer a...
Mothering the Race
Maternal metaphors : articulating gender, race, and nation at the turn of the century -- Reconstructing motherhood : Pauline Hopkins's Contending forces and the rhetoric of racial uplift -- The romance "plot" : reproducing silence, reinscribing race in The awakening and Summer -- Hard labor : Edith Summers Kelley's Weeds and the language of eugenics -- Fatal contractions : Nella Larsen's Quicksand and the new Negro mother -- Epilogue: representing motherhood at century's end.
The United Stories of America
This book discusses the American short story composite, or short story cycle, a neglected form of writing consisting of autonomous stories interlocking into a whole. The critical work done on this genre has so far focused on the closural strategies of the composites, on how unity is accomplished in these texts. This study takes into consideration, to a greater degree than earlier criticism, the short story composite as an open work, emphasizing the tension between the independent stories and the unified work, between the discontinuity and fragmentation, on the one hand, and the totalizing strategies, on the other. The discussion of the genre is illustrated with references to numerous American short story composites.
Imagining Home
War has often been seen as the domain of men and thus irrelevant to gender analysis, and American writers have frequently examined war according to traditional gender expectations: that boys become men by going to war and girls become women by building a home. Yet the writers discussed in this book complicate these expectations, since their female characters often take part directly in war and especially since their male characters repeatedly imagine domestic spaces for themselves in the midst of war. Chapters on Hemingway and the First World War, Kurt Vonnegut and the Second World War, and Tim O'Brien and the Vietnam War place these writers in their particular historical and cultural contex...
At Home, at War
This study demonstrates that such literary divisions as war novel and domestic novel limit readers' understanding of the ways these categories rely on and respond to each other. Haytock argues that gender creates an ideological context through which both domesticity and war are viewed and understood; issues of home and violence are intricately related for U.S. authors who wrote about the First World War. Haytock explores what war and domestic texts represent in light of the deconstructionist said in its cultural and historical context and seeing what is not said. Readers take food, shelter, and clothing for granted, and yet the way we treat them is part of what allows us to define ourselves ...
