Women, Compulsion, Modernity
The Moment of American Naturalism
320 pages
|
6 x 9
|
© 2004
The 1890s have long been thought one of the most male-oriented eras in American history. But in reading such writers as Frank Norris with Mary Wilkins Freeman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman with Stephen Crane, Jennifer L. Fleissner boldly argues that feminist claims in fact shaped the period's cultural mainstream. Women, Compulsion, Modernity reopens a moment when the young American woman embodied both the promise and threat of a modernizing world.
Fleissner shows that this era's expanding opportunities for women were inseparable from the same modern developments—industrialization, consumerism—typically believed to constrain human freedom. With Women, Compulsion, and Modernity, Fleissner creates a new language for the strange way the writings of the time both broaden and question individual agency.
Fleissner shows that this era's expanding opportunities for women were inseparable from the same modern developments—industrialization, consumerism—typically believed to constrain human freedom. With Women, Compulsion, and Modernity, Fleissner creates a new language for the strange way the writings of the time both broaden and question individual agency.
"Women, Compulsion, Modernity analyzes both writers and literary critics to offer new material and perspectives for readers interested in incorporating diversity into the era's literary coverage."
“A groundbreaking reinterpretation of an important period of American literature at the turn of the twentieth century. The strength of Fleissner’s criticism lies in her skillful interweaving of close textual analysis with historical context and acute theoretical inquiry. The book will have an influence beyond its immediate topic on work on literary naturalism in different national traditions and on feminist approaches to the study of literary genres.”<\#209>Amy Kaplan, University of Pennsylvania
“Self-consciously provocative, Fleissner describes a naturalism whose central preoccupation is not a futile effort to restore virile masculinity but the promise and plight of modern women; a feminism that understands the compulsive behavior of the naturalists’ women not as simply neurotic but as a response to the impossibility of plotting a female <I>Bildungsroman<I>; and a modernity that replaces a narrative of either progressive development or persistent decline with one in which characters (and ourselves) are stuck in the overwhelmingly contingent details of everyday life. An example of the revisionist impulse at its most probing.”<\#209>Brook Thomas, University of California, Irvine
“Writing the history of naturalism as a history centered on the modern woman<\#209>with her appetites, her obsessions, her repetitive motions<\#209>Jennifer Fleissner turns this hypermasculine genre on its head. An exuberant exercise.”<\#209>
Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University
Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University
“An extraordinary piece of original scholarship. Effective as literary criticism and intellectual history, <I>Women, Compulsion, Modernity<I> sets out to reorient our understanding of American literary naturalism from its present centering on masculine plots. This book will be read as perhaps the most significant contribution to the discussion of literary naturalism since the flowering of new historicist work.”<\#209>Kenneth Warren, University of Chicago
"Fleissner's book is clearly an important event, innovative, sophisticated, and often brilliant in its arguments and its discussion of history, gender, and critical method deserve a wide and attentive hearing."
"[Fleissner] offers a refreshing interpretation of naturalism by reading texts commonly recognized as naturalistic alongside those that have been characterized as regionalist or realist. . . . The most important accomplishment in this impressively resarched, theorized, and textually engaged study is its interjection of new life into a deeply contextualized vision of naturalism."
"We leave Fleissner's book both exhilirated and exhausted by the spellbinding performance of a new vision of naturalism."
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Compulsion to Describe
2. The Great Outdoors
3. A Mania for the Moment
4. The New Woman & the Old Man
5. Saving Herself
6. The Rhythm Method
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Compulsion to Describe
2. The Great Outdoors
3. A Mania for the Moment
4. The New Woman & the Old Man
5. Saving Herself
6. The Rhythm Method
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
Google preview here
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, see our international sales information.
