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Overview
Rebecca Harding Davis was a prominent author of radical social fiction during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In stories that combine realism with sentimentalism, Davis confronted a wide range of contemporary American issues, giving voice to working women, slaves, freedmen, fishermen, prostitutes, wives seeking divorce, celibate utopians, and female authors. Moreover, in her stunning blend of sentiment, gritty detail, and vernacular fiction, Davis broke down distinctions between the private and public worlds, distinctions that trapped women in the ideology of domesticity. In the first study to consider Davis as a literary activist, Jean Pfaelzer describes how Davis fulfilled her own charge to women authors to write "the inner life and history of their time with a power which shall make that time alive for future ages." By engaging current strategies in literary hermeneutics with a strong sense of historical radicalism in the Gilded Age, Pfaelzer reads Davis through the public issues that this major nineteenth-century writer forcefully inscribes in her fiction. In Pfaelzer's study, Davis's realistic narratives actively construct a coherent social work, not in a fictional vacuum but in direct engagement with the explosive movements of social change from the Civil War through the turn of the century.Editorials
Library Journal
Author of Life in the Iron-Mills (Feminist Pr., 1985. reprint), Harding Davis was a prominent U.S. fiction writer and essayist during the latter half of the 19th century; her works addressed the era's major social issues-slavery and race, the role of women, and industrialization. In this study, Pfaelzer (A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader, Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1995) presents Harding Davis as a literary activist who attempted to integrate politics, history, and literary form. Pfaelzer shows that her views of the developing industrial culture of the United States were critical and complex. Pfaelzer analyzes Harding Davis's critique of transcendentalism, her reshaping of the conventions of sentimental fiction, and her development of "a prototypical realist discourse." Unfortunately, Pfaelzer's work is marred by repetition and the formulaic vocabulary of current literary theory. Its appeal is limited to specialists and institutions with upper-division or graduate programs in American studies or U.S. literature. Other libraries should buy Pfaelzer's compilation instead.-Carolynne Myall, Eastern Washington Univ. Lib., SpokaneBooknews
A study of the work of a prominent author of radical social fiction during the second half of the 19th century, showing how she fashioned contemporary narrative forms to arouse sympathy for working women, slaves, and prostitutes, and detailing the context of her fiction in the explosive movements of social change from the Civil War through the turn of the century. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.Book Details
Published
November 30, 1996
Publisher
Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press, c1996.
Pages
282
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780822939504