A continuation of Josephine Donovan's exploration of American women's
literary traditions, begun with New England Local Color Literature:
A Women's Tradition, which treats the nineteenth-century realists,
this work analyzes the writing of major women writers of the early
twentieth century— Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow.
The author sees the Demeter-Persephone myth as central to these
writers' thematics, but interprets the myth in terms of the historical
transitions taking place in turn-of-the-century America. Donovan
focuses on the changing relationship between mothers and daughters—
in particular upon the "new women's" rebellion against the traditional
women's culture of their nineteenth-century mothers (both literary
and literal). An introductory chapter traces the male-supremacist
ideologies that formed the intellectual climate in which these women
wrote.
Reorienting Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow within women's literary
traditions produces major reinterpretations of their works, including
such masterpieces as Ethan Frome, Summer, My Antonia, Barren
Ground, and others. |
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