Transforming American Realism
Working-Class Women Writers of the Twentieth Century
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University Press of America
Published:5th Dec '06
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
At the turn of the twentieth century, realism meant drunken laborers participating in sordid sex and violent acts. As the century progressed, however, the workers seized the pen and forcibly changed the genre. When today's critics label realism a reactionary attempt to squelch social change, they ignore how working-class writers transformed it to fit their own interests. In doing so, they altered the course of American realism. Working-class women bent to their own purposes several variants of realism, including naturalism, proletarian realism, and magic realism. From the 1903 best-seller by two socialites who posed as 'factory girls' and wrote about their experiences, to the depression-era authors who tried to include women in the proletariat by writing about sex, to the later writers who incorporated their cultural heritage to create precursors of magic realism, the rise of working-class fiction has helped realism remain fresh, relevant, and lucrative.
"Lisa Orr provides a much-needed new look at the multifaceted background of modern American literary realism and a forceful corrective to postmodernist assumptions that the genre is in decline." -- Joyce Warren, Professor of American Literature and Director of Women's Studies at Queens College, CUNY
Lisa Orr's Transforming American Realism forcefully demonstrates how working women have bent the narrative strategies of realistic literature for the sake of telling true tales about the conditions under which they live. Orr's smart, sharp, provocative assessments trace one hundred years of efforts by working-class women writers to counter the narrow narratives used by other the sentimentalize, to sensationalize, and to reject the realities of class, race and ethnicity, sex and gender that define their existence. Her conclusions restore vibrancy to the practice of realistic literature and authenticity to the lives that realistic narratives are capable of portraying once their strengths are unleashed. -- Martha Banta, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles; Author ofHenry James and the Occult: The Great Extensio
ISBN: 9780761836117
Dimensions: 239mm x 154mm x 10mm
Weight: 249g
148 pages