Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The stories we tell: American Indian women's writing and the persistence of tradition
- 2 Women writers and war
- 3 American women's writing in the colonial period
- 4 Religion, sensibility, and sympathy
- 5 Women's writing of the Revolutionary era
- 6 Women writers and the early US novel
- 7 Women in literary culture during the long nineteenth century
- 8 Moral authority as literary property in mid-nineteenth-century print culture
- 9 The shape of Catharine Sedgwick's career
- 10 Writing, authorship, and genius: literary women and modes of literary production
- 11 Nineteenth-century American women's poetry: past and prospects
- 12 Transatlantic sympathies and nineteenth-century women's writing
- 13 Nineteenth-century African American women writers
- 14 Local knowledge and women's regional writing
- 15 Women and children first: female writers of American children's literature
- 16 US suffrage literature
- 17 American women playwrights
- 18 Turn-of-the-twentieth-century transitions: women on the edge of tomorrow
- 19 Accidents, agency, and American literary naturalism
- 20 The geography of ladyhood: racializing the novel of manners
- 21 Self-made women: novelists of the 1920s
- 22 Recovering the legacy of Zara Wright and the twentieth-century black woman writer
- 23 Jewish American women writers
- 24 Women on the breadlines
- 25 Modern domestic realism in America, 1950–1970
- 26 Lyric, gender, and subjectivity in modern and contemporary women's poetry
- 27 Contemporary American women's writing: women and violence
- 28 Asian American women's literature and the promise of committed art
- 29 Straight sex, queer text: American women novelists
- 30 Latina writers and the usable past
- 31 Where is she? Women/access/rhetoric
- 32 Reading women in America
- Index
- References
14 - Local knowledge and women's regional writing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2012
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The stories we tell: American Indian women's writing and the persistence of tradition
- 2 Women writers and war
- 3 American women's writing in the colonial period
- 4 Religion, sensibility, and sympathy
- 5 Women's writing of the Revolutionary era
- 6 Women writers and the early US novel
- 7 Women in literary culture during the long nineteenth century
- 8 Moral authority as literary property in mid-nineteenth-century print culture
- 9 The shape of Catharine Sedgwick's career
- 10 Writing, authorship, and genius: literary women and modes of literary production
- 11 Nineteenth-century American women's poetry: past and prospects
- 12 Transatlantic sympathies and nineteenth-century women's writing
- 13 Nineteenth-century African American women writers
- 14 Local knowledge and women's regional writing
- 15 Women and children first: female writers of American children's literature
- 16 US suffrage literature
- 17 American women playwrights
- 18 Turn-of-the-twentieth-century transitions: women on the edge of tomorrow
- 19 Accidents, agency, and American literary naturalism
- 20 The geography of ladyhood: racializing the novel of manners
- 21 Self-made women: novelists of the 1920s
- 22 Recovering the legacy of Zara Wright and the twentieth-century black woman writer
- 23 Jewish American women writers
- 24 Women on the breadlines
- 25 Modern domestic realism in America, 1950–1970
- 26 Lyric, gender, and subjectivity in modern and contemporary women's poetry
- 27 Contemporary American women's writing: women and violence
- 28 Asian American women's literature and the promise of committed art
- 29 Straight sex, queer text: American women novelists
- 30 Latina writers and the usable past
- 31 Where is she? Women/access/rhetoric
- 32 Reading women in America
- Index
- References
Summary
Critical concerns
Regional fiction, though often associated with the short stories published in the highbrow magazines of the late nineteenth century, has proven to be an enduring genre in US fiction, especially for women writers who were among its first and most accomplished practitioners. Regional fiction's fortunes in the canon of US literature – that selected group of texts thought to be most important to the story that scholars tell about the nation's coherence – have been a barometer of the rise and fall of women's place in that canon. The canon debates around what constitutes great literature were in part spurred by the contemporary political and social debates about who counted in American culture, about whose opinions and knowledge could be understood as both disinterested and distinctive, about who was capable of addressing everyone in the nation while also expressing their own powerfully individualistic and autonomous point of view. In the 1970s and '80s, when feminist activists and feminist literary historians (such as Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert, Elaine Showalter, Mary Poovey, Nina Baym, Judith Fetterley, and Marjorie Pryse) recovered the work of women writers who had been consigned to the dust heap of history, they opened up the canon of US literature to perspectives that challenged the dominant narrative of how literature helped to maintain national unity and coherence, and, by doing so, they revealed a literary and cultural history in which the contests over what counted as literature, culture, and citizenship were pressing concerns for a range of writers and readers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature , pp. 293 - 308Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012
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