Janet Gallingani Casey
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195338959
- eISBN:
- 9780199867103
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195338959.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This book reconceptualizes American modernity by focusing on rurality and women. It challenges the notion of the city as the privileged site of modern experience, arguing that ...
More
This book reconceptualizes American modernity by focusing on rurality and women. It challenges the notion of the city as the privileged site of modern experience, arguing that rurality—urbanity’s opposite, frequently associated with nostalgia and feminine sentimentality—was a fruitful geographic and psychic location for registering women’s perceptions of the modern. As its title implies, however, it is less about the empirical facts of farm life than about its abstractions—the idea of rurality, and the ways in which women were positioned, by themselves and others, in reference to it. Attending closely to language, images, and figurative connections, it demonstrates the theoretical importance of rurality to the imaginative construction of American modernity and modernism, and asserts that women had a special stake in that relation. To that end, it considers idea(l)s of women and rurality across a broad field of discourses and representational arenas, including social theory, periodical literature, literary criticism, photography, and, especially, women’s rural fiction (“low” and “high”). It engages such diverse subjects as eugenics, advertising, the literary prize culture of the 1920s, and the role of the camera in defining women as modern. It also relies on substantial archival research, and explores at length an underrecognized periodical, The Farmer’s Wife, which was the single nationally distributed farm periodical for women in the twentieth century. Ultimately, the book’s aim is to articulate an alternative mode of American modernism that had special meaning and appeal for women, and to show how that mode clearly responded to prevalent attitudes about agrarianism, modernity, and gender in the culture at large.
Less
This book reconceptualizes American modernity by focusing on rurality and women. It challenges the notion of the city as the privileged site of modern experience, arguing that rurality—urbanity’s opposite, frequently associated with nostalgia and feminine sentimentality—was a fruitful geographic and psychic location for registering women’s perceptions of the modern. As its title implies, however, it is less about the empirical facts of farm life than about its abstractions—the idea of rurality, and the ways in which women were positioned, by themselves and others, in reference to it. Attending closely to language, images, and figurative connections, it demonstrates the theoretical importance of rurality to the imaginative construction of American modernity and modernism, and asserts that women had a special stake in that relation. To that end, it considers idea(l)s of women and rurality across a broad field of discourses and representational arenas, including social theory, periodical literature, literary criticism, photography, and, especially, women’s rural fiction (“low” and “high”). It engages such diverse subjects as eugenics, advertising, the literary prize culture of the 1920s, and the role of the camera in defining women as modern. It also relies on substantial archival research, and explores at length an underrecognized periodical, The Farmer’s Wife, which was the single nationally distributed farm periodical for women in the twentieth century. Ultimately, the book’s aim is to articulate an alternative mode of American modernism that had special meaning and appeal for women, and to show how that mode clearly responded to prevalent attitudes about agrarianism, modernity, and gender in the culture at large.
Elaine Showalter
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198123835
- eISBN:
- 9780191671616
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198123835.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Are American women writers from different eras and different backgrounds connected by common threads in a coherent tradition? How have the relationships between women's rights, women's ...
More
Are American women writers from different eras and different backgrounds connected by common threads in a coherent tradition? How have the relationships between women's rights, women's rites, and women's writing figured in the history of literature by women in the United States? Drawing on a wide range of writers from Margaret Fuller to Alice Walker, the author argues that post-colonial as well as feminist literary theory can help in understanding the hybrid, intertextual, and changing forms of American women's writing, and the way that ‘women's culture’ intersects with other cultural forms. She looks closely at three American classics – Little Women, The Awakening, and The House of Mirth – and traces the transformations in such major themes, images, and genres of American women's writing as the American Miranda, the Female Gothic, and the patchwork quilt. Ending with a moving description of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, she shows how the women's tradition is a literary quilt that offers a new map of a changing America.
Less
Are American women writers from different eras and different backgrounds connected by common threads in a coherent tradition? How have the relationships between women's rights, women's rites, and women's writing figured in the history of literature by women in the United States? Drawing on a wide range of writers from Margaret Fuller to Alice Walker, the author argues that post-colonial as well as feminist literary theory can help in understanding the hybrid, intertextual, and changing forms of American women's writing, and the way that ‘women's culture’ intersects with other cultural forms. She looks closely at three American classics – Little Women, The Awakening, and The House of Mirth – and traces the transformations in such major themes, images, and genres of American women's writing as the American Miranda, the Female Gothic, and the patchwork quilt. Ending with a moving description of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, she shows how the women's tradition is a literary quilt that offers a new map of a changing America.
