Research Catalog

Title

Writing : the pioneer woman / Janet Floyd.

Author

Floyd, Janet.

Publication

Columbia : University of Missouri Press, [2002], ©2002.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

ix, 228 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

• "Focusing on a series of autobiographical texts published and private, well known and obscure, Writing the Pioneer Woman examines the writing of domestic life on the nineteenth-century North American frontier. In an attempt to determine the meanings found in the pioneer woman's everyday writings - from records of recipes to descriptions of washing floors - Janet Floyd explores domestic details in the autobiographical writing of British and Anglo-American female emigrants.".
• "Floyd argues that the figure of the pioneer housewife has been a significant one within general cultural debates about the home and the domestic life of women, on both sides of the Atlantic. She looks at the varied ideological work performed by this figure over the last 150 years and at what the pioneer woman signifies and has signified in national cultural debates concerning womanhood and home.".
• "The autobiographies under discussion are not only of homemaking but also of emigration. Equally, these texts are about the enterprise of emigration, with several of them written to advise prospective emigrants.
• Using the insights of diaspora and migration theory, Floyd shows that these writings portray a far subtler role for the pioneer woman than is suggested by previous scholars, who often see her either as participating directly in the overall domestication of colonial space or as being strictly marginal to that process."--BOOK JACKET.

Alternative Title

Pioneer woman

Subject

• American prose literature > History and criticism
• Frontier and pioneer life > United States > Historiography
• Women immigrants > United States > History and criticism
• Women pioneers > United States > History and criticism
• Immigrants' writings, American > History and criticism
• Women and literature > United States > History
• Autobiography > Women authors

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-215) and index.

Contents

1. A Tradition of Pioneers -- 2. Private Enterprise: The Emigrant Autobiographies of Kitturah Belknap and Susanna Moodie -- 3. Recipes for Success: Catharine Parr Traill's Empire of Woman -- 4. Domesticity and Dirt: Eliza Farnham's Life in Prairie Land and Christiana Tillson's Reminiscences of Early Life in Illinois -- 5. "A Space in Which to Be Imaginative": Caroline Kirkland's A New Home, Who'll Follow? -- 6. Plotting the Golden West: Autobiographers of the Mining West -- 7. "To Recover Those Once Lost and Now Forgotten": Anne Langton's Journal and Memoir -- Conclusion: Writing the Pioneer Woman.

ISBN

0826213812 (alk. paper)

LCCN

2002017957

OCLC

• ocm48857825
• SCSB-4254320

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries