Research Catalog

Through the window, out the door : women's narratives of departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion

Title
Through the window, out the door : women's narratives of departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion / Janis P. Stout.
Author
Stout, Janis P.
Publication
Tuscaloosa, Ala. : University of Alabama Press, 1998.

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Details

Description
xix, 312 pages : illustrations; 24 cm
Summary
  • An important moment in many novels and poems by American women writers occurs when a central character looks out a window or walks out the door of a house. These acts of departure serve to convey such values as the rejection of constraining social patterns, the search for individual fulfillment, and the entry into the political.
  • Janis Stout examines such moments and related patterns of venture and travel in the fiction of five major American novelists of the 20th century: Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion.
  • Moving between texts and between texts and contexts, Stout shows how women writers have envisioned the walls of both physical and social structures (including genres) as permeable boundaries, drawing on both a rhetoric of liberation and a rhetoric of domesticity to construct narrative arguments for women's right to move freely between the two.
Subjects
Note
  • "This volume is an extension and rebuttal of earlier book: The journey narrative in American literature, published in 1983."
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-301) and index.
Contents
1. Finding a Way Out: The Imagination of Departure -- 2. Keeping One Foot at Home: Mary Austin and the "Circuit of the House" -- 3. Looking Out the Window: Willa Cather and the Vesuvian Impulse -- 4. Escaping the House: Anne Tyler's Fictions of (Leaving) Home -- 5. Escaping History: Toni Morrison and the Migration Blues -- 6. Moving into the Political: Joan Didion and the Imagination of Engagement.
ISBN
081730908X (cloth)
LCCN
97031425
OCLC
  • 37545513
  • ocm37545513
Owning Institutions
Columbia University Libraries