Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism - Hardcover

Pfaelzer, Jean

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822939509 ISBN 13: 9780822939504

Verlag: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996

Inhaltsangabe

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, slaves, freedmen, fishermen, prostitutes, wives seeking divorce, celibate utopians, and female authors. Moreover, in her stunning blend of sentiment, gritty detail, and vernacular fiction, Davis broke down distinctions between the private and public worlds, distinctions that trapped women in the ideology of domesticity.
In the first study to consider Davis as a literary activist, Jean Pfaelzer describes how Davis fulfilled her own charge to women authors to write "the inner life and history of their time with a power which shall make that time alive for future ages."
By engaging current strategies in literary hermeneutics with a strong sense of historical radicalism in the Gilded Age, Pfaelzer reads Davis through the public issues that this major nineteenth-century writer forcefully inscribes in her fiction. In Pfaelzer's 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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jean Pfaelzer is professor of English at the University of Delaware.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1996
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822939509
• ISBN 13: 9780822939504
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 282
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar