New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Reading with and against the Grain
Stephanie Palmer editor Cécile Roudeau editor Myrto Drizou editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Published:21st Feb '23
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Freeman is best known today for her short regionalist fiction. Recently, Freeman studies have taken new turns including ecocriticism, trauma studies, the Gothic, and queer theory. The essay collection pushes these developments further. Contributors aim at revisiting and going beyond Freeman’s regionalism. They challenge earlier feminist readings of the female realm by arguing that her short fiction and novels depict women and girls as violent and criminal, suffocating as well as nurturing; they bring to light questions of race and ethnicity that have been conspicuously absent from scholarship on Freeman, as well as issues of class. Because questions of women’s work are central to Freeman’s oeuvre, this collection discusses Freeman’s acumen as a businesswoman herself, a participant as well as a castigator of turn-of-the-century US capitalism. Finally, essays reconsider the periodization of Freeman by exploring her little acknowledged post-1902 and therefore post-marriage fiction—her war stories and her urban stories.
The editors have curated an impressive collection devoted to reexamining Freeman since the second wave feminist reclamation of this author, who, along with others, had faded into obscurity in accordance with changing (masculinist) literary tastes. […] This volume succeeds admirably in restoring increased complexity to the critical appraisal of Freeman’s oeuvre. -- Wendy Ryden, Long Island University Post * Edith Wharton Review *
New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman offers a fresh look at this remarkable 19th-century writer. The essays capture the range of Freeman’s work, "with and against the grain," and the problem with traditional categorization, uncovering alternative modes of critical thinking about a writer whose work spans almost 50 years. -- Leah Blatt Glasser, Mount Holyoke College
This book does not counter the common critical approaches to Freeman’s work, but rather New Perspectives builds upon these readings and creates innovative interpretations. [...] Overall, New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman makes a compelling case for this American author’s relevance not only as a New England regionalist and a late nineteenth/early twentieth-century writer, but also as a forceful female voice that speaks strongly to all readers today. -- Cara Erdheim Kilgallen * Studies in American Naturalism *
New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading with and against the Grain is a welcome contribution to our understanding of a highly prolific writer whose work deserves the new attention of the kind the book itself represents. [...] all these essays separately and together give us valuable new ways of seeing and reading Freeman both in and out of our own time. -- Bridget Bennett, University of Leeds * Transatlantica *
ISBN: 9781399504478
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
312 pages