The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett is one of the most important works of New England local color fiction. This collection of essays builds on feminist literary scholarship that affirms the value of Jewett's work, but goes beyond previously published studies by offering an analysis of how race, nationalism, and the literary marketplace shape her narrative. The volume constitutes a major rethinking of Jewett's contribution to American literature, and will be of interest to the fields of American literary studies, feminist cultural criticism, and American studies.

In Publishing the Family June Howard turns a study of the collaborative novel The Whole Family into a lens through which to examine American literature and culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. Striving to do equal justice to historical particulars and the broad horizons of social change, Howard reconsiders such categories of analysis as authorship, genre, and periodization. In the process, she offers a new method for cultural studies and American studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Publishing the Family describes the sources and...

In Publishing the Family June Howard turns a study of the collaborative novel The Whole Family into a lens through which to examine American literature and culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. Striving to do equal justice to historical particulars and the broad horizons of social change, Howard reconsiders such categories of analysis as authorship, genre, and periodization. In the process, she offers a new method for cultural studies and American studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Publishing the Family describes the sources and...

Examining the novels of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and other writers, June Howard presents a study of American literary naturalism as a genre. Naturalism, she states, is a way of imagining the world and the relation of the self to the world, a way of making sense -- and making narrative -- out of the comforts and discomforts of its historical moment.

Howard believes that naturalism accomodates the sense of perilousness, uncertainty, and disorder that many Americans felt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She argues for a redefinition of the form...