"This collection represents an appreciation of Sarah Orne Jewett in every sense of the word. It both grasps the nature, worth, and quality of Jewett's oeuvre and judges it with heightened perception and candor."--Mary Lowe-Evans, University of West Florida
Essays about identity and difference, tradition and transformation, region and nation add an energetic and diverse set of voices to current discussions about Sarah Orne Jewett, 19th-century American women's writing, and the reshaping of the literary canon.
Contents
"Confronting Time and Change": Jewett, Region, and Nation, by Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas Edwards
I. Contexts: Readers and Reading
1. Sex, Class, and Category Crisis: Jewett and the Postmodern Reader, by Marjorie Pryse
2. "In Search of Local Color": Context, Controversy, and The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Donna Campbell
3. "Links of Similitude": The Narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs and Author-Reader Relations at the End of the 19th Century, by Melissa Homestead
4. "To Make Them Acquainted with One Another": Jewett, Howells, and the Dual Aesthetic of Deephaven, by Paul Petrie
II. Contemporaries: Jewett and the Writing World
5. Challenge and Compliance: Textual Strategies in A Country Doctor and 19th-Century American Women's Medical Autobiographies, by Judith Wittenberg
6. Transcendentalism to Ecofeminism: Celia Thaxter and Sarah Orne Jewett's Island Views Revisited, by Marcia Littenberg
7. The Professor and the Pointed Firs: Cather, Jewett, and the Problem of Editing, by Ann Romines
8. Visions of New England: The Anxiety of Jewett's Influence on Ethan Frome, by Priscilla Leder
III. Conflicts: Identity and Ideology
9. Whiteness as Loss in Sarah Orne Jewett's "The Foreigner," by Mitzi Schrag
10. "How Clearly the Gradations of Society Were Defined": Negotiating Class in Sarah Orne Jewett, by Alison Easton
11. Purity and Danger: Gender and Class in Jewett's "The Best China Saucer," by Sarah Way Sherman
IV. Connections: Jewett's Time and Place
12. "A Brave Happiness": Rites and Celebrations in Jewett's Ordered Past, by Graham Frater
13. We Do Not All Go Two by Two; Or, Abandoning the Ark, by Patti Capel Swartz
14. Jewett's Maine: A Journey Back, by Carol Schachinger
Karen L. Kilcup is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her recent publications include Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition, Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology, Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader, and Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition.
Thomas S. Edwards, associate academic dean at Castleton State College in Vermont, has published in the areas of 19th- and 20th-century social and literary history, popular culture, and literary translation.