"How Celia Changed Her Mind" and Selected Stories

Author: Rose Terry Cooke
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813511665
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This anthology of fiction by Rose Terry Cooke contains eleven stories, drawn together for the first time in one volume, that reflect the whole spectrum of Cooke's career from the 1850s to the 1890s. It restores to American literature the work of a writer highly admired in her own day and increasingly recognized today as an important figure in the development of realism, the evolution of regionalism as a literary form, and the emergence of women writers in nineteenth-century fiction. Cooke's stories are rich literarily and historically; her command of dialect, ear for dialogue, dramatic sense, and ability to draw interesting, memorable characters all distinguish her work. This reissue of some of her best work represents an important contribution to the canon of American literature.

"How Celia Changed Her Mind" and Selected Stories

Author: Rose Terry Cooke
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813511665
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This anthology of fiction by Rose Terry Cooke contains eleven stories, drawn together for the first time in one volume, that reflect the whole spectrum of Cooke's career from the 1850s to the 1890s. It restores to American literature the work of a writer highly admired in her own day and increasingly recognized today as an important figure in the development of realism, the evolution of regionalism as a literary form, and the emergence of women writers in nineteenth-century fiction. Cooke's stories are rich literarily and historically; her command of dialect, ear for dialogue, dramatic sense, and ability to draw interesting, memorable characters all distinguish her work. This reissue of some of her best work represents an important contribution to the canon of American literature.

Circulating Queerness

Circulating Queerness PDF Author: Natasha Hurley
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452957002
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
A new history of the queer novel shows its role in constructing gay and lesbian lives The gay and lesbian novel has long been a distinct literary genre with its own awards, shelving categories, bookstore spaces, and book reviews. But very little has been said about the remarkable history of its emergence in American literature, particularly the ways in which the novel about homosexuality did not just reflect but actively produced queer life. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s insight that the history of society is connected to the history of language, author Natasha Hurley charts the messy, complex movement by which the queer novel produced the very frames that made it legible as a distinct literature and central to the imagination of queer worlds. Her vision of the queer novel's development revolves around the bold argument that literary circulation is the key ingredient that has made the gay and lesbian novel and its queer forebears available to its audiences. Challenging the narrative that the gay and lesbian novel came into view in response to the emergence of homosexuality as a concept, Hurley posits a much longer history of this novelistic genre. In so doing, she revises our understanding of the history of sexuality, as well as of the processes of producing new concepts and the evolution of new categories of language.

Truth Stranger Than Fiction

Truth Stranger Than Fiction PDF Author: Augusta Rohrbach
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230107265
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
Using the lens of business history to contextualize the development of an American literary tradition, Truth Stranger than Fiction shows how African American literature and culture greatly influenced the development of realism, which remains one of the most significant genres of writing in the United States. More specifically, Truth Stranger than Fiction traces the influences of generic conventions popularized in slave narratives - such as the use of authenticating details, as well as dialect, and a frank treatment of the human body - in later realist writings. As it unfolds, Truth Stranger than Fiction poses and explores a set of questions about the shifting relationship between literature and culture in the United States from 1830-1930 by focusing on the evolving trend of literary realism. Beginning with the question, 'How might slave narratives - heralded as the first indigenous literature by Theodore Parker - have influenced the development of American Literature?' the book develops connections between an emerging literary marketplace, the rise of the professional writer, and literary realism.

American Women's Regionalist Fiction

American Women's Regionalist Fiction PDF Author: Monika Elbert
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030555526
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic seeks to redress the monolithic vision of American Gothic by analyzing the various sectional or regional attempts to Gothicize what is most claustrophobic or peculiar about local history. Since women writers were often relegated to inferior status, it is especially compelling to look at women from the Gothic perspective. The regionalist Gothic develops along the line of difference and not unity—thus emphasizing regional peculiarities or a sense of superiority in terms of regional history, natural landscapes, immigrant customs, folk tales, or idiosyncratic ways. The essays study the uncanny or the haunting quality of “the commonplace,” as Hawthorne would have it in his introduction to The House of the Seven Gables, in regionalist Gothic fiction by a wide range of women writers between ca. 1850 and 1930. This collection seeks to examine how/if the regionalist perspective is small, limited, and stultifying and leads to Gothic moments, or whether the intersection between local and national leads to a clash that is jarring and Gothic in nature.

Miss Lulu Bett and Selected Stories

Miss Lulu Bett and Selected Stories PDF Author: Zona Gale
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307426904
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Lulu Bett lives in a small town with her sister Ina and Ina’s husband Dwight–a dentist who rules his household with self-righteous smugness. The unmarried Lulu has learned that she cannot question her role as chief cook, housekeeper, and gracious presence. But when Dwight’s sophisticated brother Ninian comes to visit, Lulu finds in herself a surprising wit–and the boldness to accept his playful proposal of marriage. Through her appealing, determined heroine, Zona Gale satirically dispatches a sheaf of the social assumptions of her day, from male supremacy to the security of marriage. First published in 1920, Miss Lulu Bett was immediately acclaimed, and went on to become one of two bestselling novels of the year. Together with four of Gale’s short stories–including the O. Henry award-winning “Bridal Pond”–Miss Lulu Bett reflects Gale’s broad progressive interests and the fast-paced, affecting prose which made her one of the most popular writers of her time and a classic American storteller. “A great book . . . the telling is almost incomparable” —Robert Benchley, The World “Eloquent. . . . Miss Lulu Bett is without flaw” —The Atlantic Monthly “It has a narrowly limned beauty. . . . The book stands as a signal accomplishment in American letters” —The New Republic

Stories from the Country of Lost Borders

Stories from the Country of Lost Borders PDF Author: Mary Austin
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813512181
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain (1903) and Lost Borders (1909), both set in the California desert, make intimate connections between animals, people, and the land they inhabit. For Austin, the two indispensable conditions of her fiction were that the region must enter the story "as another character, as the instigator of plot," and that the story must reflect "the essential qualities of the land." In The Land of Little Rain, Austin's attention to natural detail allows her to write prose that is geologically, biologically, and botanically accurate at the same time that it offers metaphorical insight into human emotional and spiritual experience. In Lost Borders, Austin focuses on both white and Indian women's experiences in the desert, looks for the sources of their deprivation, and finds them in the ways life betrays them, usually in the guise of men. She offers several portraits of strong women characters but ultimately identifies herself with the desert, which she personifies as a woman.

A Companion to the American Short Story

A Companion to the American Short Story PDF Author: Alfred Bendixen
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119685648
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
A COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY A Companion to the American Short Story traces the development of this versatile literary genre over the past two centuries. Written by leading critics in the field, and edited by two major scholars, it explores a wide range of writers, from Edgar Allen Poe and Edith Wharton, at the end of the nineteenth century to important modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Wright. Contributions with a broader focus address groups of multiethnic, Asian, and Jewish writers. Each chapter places the short story into context, focusing on the interaction of cultural forces and aesthetic principles. The Companion takes account of cutting edge approaches to literary studies and contributes to the ongoing redefinition of the American canon, embracing genres such as ghost and detective fiction, cycles of interrelated short fiction, and comic, social and political stories. The volume also reflects the diverse communities that have adopted this literary form and made it their own, featuring entries on a variety of feminist and multicultural traditions. This volume presents an important new consideration of the role of the short story in the literary history of American literature.

Kitchen Economics

Kitchen Economics PDF Author: Thomas Strychacz
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 081732058X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
An analysis of how nineteenth-century women regional writers represent political economic thought WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE Readers of late nineteenth-century female American authors are familiar with plots, characters, and households that make a virtue of economizing. Scholars often interpret these scenarios in terms of a mythos of parsimony, frequently accompanied by a sort of elegiac republicanism whereby self-sufficiency and autonomy are put to the service of the greater good—a counterworld to the actual economic conditions of the period. In Kitchen Economics: Women’s Regionalist Fiction and Political Economy, Thomas Strychacz takes a new approach to the question of how female regionalist fictions represent “the economic” by situating them within traditions of classical political economic thought. Offering case studies of key works by Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, this study focuses on three complex cultural fables—the island commonwealth, stadialism (or stage theory), and feeding the body politic—which found formal expression in political economic thought, made their way into endless public debates about the economic turmoil of the late nineteenth century, and informed female authors. These works represent counterparts, not counterworlds, to modernity; and their characteristic stance is captured in the complex trope of feminaeconomica. This approach ultimately leads us to reconsider what we mean by the term “economic,” for the emphasis of contemporary neoclassical economics on economic agents given over to infinite wants and complete self-interest has caused the “sufficiency” and “common good” models of female regionalist authors to be misinterpreted and misvalued. These fictions are nowhere more pertinent to modernity than in their alliance with today’s important alternative economic discourses.

The Amber Gods, and Other Stories

The Amber Gods, and Other Stories PDF Author: Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813514017
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This collection contains ten tales -- including five that have never before appeared in book form -- by Hamet Prescott Spofford, the only woman writer to master the mode of the symbolic romance, which is often clamed to represent the mainstream of American fiction. Spofford dazzled readers in the early 1860s with a number of stories that seemed to enlarge the boundaries of romantic fiction. She established a reputation as the female heir to the literary tradition of Poe and Hawthorne with such works as the detective story "In a Cellar," the complex symbolic romance "The Amber Gods," and the frightening tale of frontier adventure. "Circumstance." These three stories provide the most important female counterpart to the works of the major male romantics and represent the final flowering of romantic fiction in New England.

The Hidden Hand, Or, Capitola the Madcap

The Hidden Hand, Or, Capitola the Madcap PDF Author: Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813512969
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
E.D.E.N. Southworth was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the nineteenth century and her Capitola Black, or Black Cap - a cross-dressing, adventure-seeking girl-woman - was so well-loved that the book was serialized three times between 1859 and 1888 and was dramatized in forty different versions. There are bandits, true-loves, evil men, long-lost mothers, and sweet women friends in Capitola's future - not to mention thunder storms, kidnap attempts, and duels. The pace is fast, the action wonderfully unbelievable. This is escape literature at its nineteenth-century best, with a woman at its center who makes you feel strong, daring, and reckless.