Research Catalog

Title

Parlor radical : Rebecca Harding Davis and the origins of American social realism / Jean Pfaelzer.

Author

Pfaelzer, Jean.

Publication

Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press, [1996], ©1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xi, 282 pages; 25 cm

Summary

• Rebecca Harding Davis was a prominent author of radical social fiction during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In stories that combine realism with sentimentalism, Davis confronted a wide range of contemporary American issues, giving voice to working women, slaves, freedmen, fishermen, prostitutes, wives seeking divorce, celibate utopians, and female authors.
• Moreover, in her stunning blend of sentiment, gritty detail, and vernacular fiction, Davis broke down distinctions between the private and public worlds, distinctions that trapped women in the ideology of domesticity. In the first study to consider Davis as a literary activist, Jean Pfaelzer describes how Davis fulfilled her own charge to women authors to write "the inner life and history of their time with a power which shall make that time alive for future ages.".
• By engaging current strategies in literary hermeneutics with a strong sense of historical radicalism in the Gilded Age, Pfaelzer reads Davis through the public issues that this major nineteenth-century writer forcefully inscribes in her fiction. In Pfaelzer's study, Davis's realistic narratives actively construct a coherent social work, not in a fictional vacuum but in direct engagement with the explosive movements of social change from the Civil War through the turn of the century.

Subject

• Davis, Rebecca Harding, 1831-1910 > Criticism and interpretation
• Literature and society > United States > History > 19th century
• Women and literature > United States > History > 19th century
• Radicalism > United States > History > 19th century
• Social problems in literature
• Social realism in literature
• Radicalism in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-273) and index.

Contents

1. Introduction: History, Narrative, and Subjectivity -- 2. The Terrible Question of "Life in the Iron-Mills" -- 3. The Common Story of Margret Howth -- 4. The Savage Necessity of Abolition and Civil War -- 5. The Soul Starvation of the Domestic Woman -- 6. Race, Reconstruction, and the Discourse of Sentiment: Waiting for the Verdict -- 7. Nature, Nurture, and Nationalism: "A Faded Leaf of History" -- 8. The Politics of Nature: "The Yares of Black Mountain" -- 9. To Be, to Do, and to Suffer: The New Woman.

ISBN

• 0822939509 (alk. paper)
• 0822956071 (pbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

96012742

OCLC

ocm34411764

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries