California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal
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- Synopsis
- California Dreams and American Contradictions establishes a genealogy of western American women writers publishing between 1870 and 1965 to argue that both white women and women of color regionalized dominant national literary trends to negotiate the contradictions between an American liberal individualism and American equality. Monique McDade analyzes works by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sui Sin Far, and a previously unstudied African American writer, Eva Rutland, to trace an archive of western American women writers who made visible what dominant genres subsumed under images of American progress and westward expansion. Read together these writers provide new entry points into the political debates that have plagued the United States since the nation&’s founding and that set the precedent for westward expansion. Their romances, regional sketches, memoirs, and journalism point to the inherently antagonistic relationship between a Rooseveltian rugged individualism that encouraged an Anglo male–dominated West and the progressive equality and opportunity the West seemingly promised disenfranchised citizens. The writers included in California Dreams and American Contradictions challenged literature&’s role in creating regional division, conformist communities that support nationally sponsored images of gendered, ethnic, and immigrant others, and liberal histories validated through a strategic vocabulary rooted in &“freedom,&” &“equality,&” and &“progress.&”
- Copyright:
- 2022
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 274 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9781496235282
- Related ISBNs:
- 9781496232960
- Publisher:
- Nebraska
- Date of Addition:
- 03/01/23
- Copyrighted By:
- the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Literature and Fiction, Language Arts
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.