Not in sisterhood : Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the politics of female authorship

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Where to find it

Davis Library (8th floor)

Call Number
PS374.F45 W55 2001
Status
Available

Summary

Not In Sisterhood investigates an important transitional moment in the history of U.S. women's writing : the uneasy shift from the 19th-century model of the "lady author" to some new but undefined alternative. The careers of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, together with that of their friend and peer Zona Gale, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, reveal several different strategies for negotiating this unknown terrain. While Gale made her feminist politics an integral part of her successful novels and plays, Wharton and Cather publicly denied any interest in gender issues or social reforms. Not in Sisterhood shows how the complex intersections of literary and social politics that shaped the world of Wharton, Cather, and Gale are still at work in today's feminist reconstructions of literary history.

Contents

  • Acknowledgments p. ix
  • Introduction: "Strangled with a petticoat" p. 1
  • Chapter 1 Threats of Correspondence: The Letters of Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and Edith Wharton p. 11
  • Chapter 2 Women Who Did Things Openly: Zona Gale's Utopian Vision p. 49
  • Chapter 3 Sisterhood and Literary Authority in The House of Mirth, My Antonia, and Miss Lulu Bett p. 87
  • Chapter 4 Women at War: Crossing the Gender-Genre Boundary p. 125
  • Conclusion: Making Histories p. 163
  • Notes p. 179
  • Works Cited p. 207
  • Index p. 219

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