Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism

ISBN-13: 9780226253107 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 320 str.

Fleissner; Jennifer L. Fleissner

Opis

On the cusp of a modern America, life at the turn of the nineteenth century has been characterized as distinctly male oriented. Yet in Women, Compulsion, Modernity, Jennifer L. Fleissner disputes this popular view and uncovers a new understanding of the era through naturalism - the prominent literary style of the time. Fleissner reveals that the modern woman stood at the center of the increasingly industrial, urbanized, and consumer-driven world around her far earlier than previously acknowledged. To illustrate this point, Fleissner considers iconic literary examples - novels by Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, and Edith Wharton - in which a young woman hoping to better herself emerges as the embodiment of both the promise and the threat of an emergent modernity. historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to demonstrate further the feminist sensibilities that shaped the cultural mainstream at this time. Radically challenging long-held perceptions of gender and society, this book effectively rewrites an entire field of literary criticism with bold and original angles. The result is an unprecedented, synthetic view of the era's literary and intellectual culture.