California Dreams and American Contradictions
Women Writers and the Western Ideal
Seiten
2023
University of Nebraska Press (Verlag)
978-1-4962-3296-0 (ISBN)
University of Nebraska Press (Verlag)
978-1-4962-3296-0 (ISBN)
In California Dreams and American Contradictions Monique McDade examines a group of diverse women writers of the American West from an intersectional standpoint to understand the progressive narratives the West tells about itself.
California Dreams and American Contradictions establishes a genealogy of western American women writers publishing between 1870 and 1965 to argue that both white women and women of color regionalized dominant national literary trends to negotiate the contradictions between an American liberal individualism and American equality. Monique McDade analyzes works by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sui Sin Far, and a previously unstudied African American writer, Eva Rutland, to trace an archive of western American women writers who made visible what dominant genres subsumed under images of American progress and westward expansion.
Read together these writers provide new entry points into the political debates that have plagued the United States since the nation’s founding and that set the precedent for westward expansion. Their romances, regional sketches, memoirs, and journalism point to the inherently antagonistic relationship between a Rooseveltian rugged individualism that encouraged an Anglo male–dominated West and the progressive equality and opportunity the West seemingly promised disenfranchised citizens. The writers included in California Dreams and American Contradictions challenged literature’s role in creating regional division, conformist communities that support nationally sponsored images of gendered, ethnic, and immigrant others, and liberal histories validated through a strategic vocabulary rooted in “freedom,” “equality,” and “progress.”
California Dreams and American Contradictions establishes a genealogy of western American women writers publishing between 1870 and 1965 to argue that both white women and women of color regionalized dominant national literary trends to negotiate the contradictions between an American liberal individualism and American equality. Monique McDade analyzes works by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sui Sin Far, and a previously unstudied African American writer, Eva Rutland, to trace an archive of western American women writers who made visible what dominant genres subsumed under images of American progress and westward expansion.
Read together these writers provide new entry points into the political debates that have plagued the United States since the nation’s founding and that set the precedent for westward expansion. Their romances, regional sketches, memoirs, and journalism point to the inherently antagonistic relationship between a Rooseveltian rugged individualism that encouraged an Anglo male–dominated West and the progressive equality and opportunity the West seemingly promised disenfranchised citizens. The writers included in California Dreams and American Contradictions challenged literature’s role in creating regional division, conformist communities that support nationally sponsored images of gendered, ethnic, and immigrant others, and liberal histories validated through a strategic vocabulary rooted in “freedom,” “equality,” and “progress.”
Monique McDade is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Kalamazoo College.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Frontier Ethic and the American Paradox
1. “Autoethnographic” Heroines: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Sentimental Novels, Who Would Have Thought It? and The Squatter and the Don
2. The Liberal Fantasy: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Sentimental Advocacy in Ramona
3. Sui Sin Far’s Genre of Intervention: The Regional Sketch and the “Real” in Realism
4. An Autobiography of Western American Integration: Eva Rutland and Her Alternative Politics of Respectability
Conclusion: Joan Didion’s Sacramento and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Deep Story”
Notes
Bibliography
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 20.01.2023 |
|---|---|
| Zusatzinfo | index |
| Verlagsort | Lincoln |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-4962-3296-8 / 1496232968 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-4962-3296-0 / 9781496232960 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
Mehr entdecken
aus dem Bereich
aus dem Bereich
Poetik eines sozialen Urteils
Buch | Hardcover (2023)
De Gruyter (Verlag)
CHF 83,90
Buch | Softcover (2024)
belleville (Verlag)
CHF 27,95
