Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Feminist Literary Criticism, Travel Writing - History & Criticism, Literary Criticism - U.S. Fiction & Prose Literature - General & Miscellaneous, Feminism & Literature

Secret Journeys

Name: Secret Journeys
Author: Marilyn C. Wesley
ISBN: 9780791439968

by Marilyn C. Wesley

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Overview

Secret Journeys examines the subversive and constructive narrative of female journey from the seventeenth century to the present in such works as John Greenleaf Whittier's Snowbound, Mary Rowlandson's A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mary Rowlandson, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, Edith Wharton's Summer, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Eudora Welty's short fiction, and Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. In recognizing the figure of the woman traveler, Wesley produces new readings of canonical texts that subvert social and political assumptions in texts by men and construct alternative arrangements in texts by women.

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Booknews

Through canvassing women's travel as portrayed in American literature from the 17th century to the present, Wesley (English, Hartwick College, NY) demonstrates that women have shared in that gendered metaphor for freedom and progress, though covertly in earlier eras. The author develops a feminist narrative theory of female capability to replace the stale model of female victimization by analyzing women's travel as contravention of values ("the not unfeared, half-welcome guest" of Greenleaf's 1866 poem Snow- Bound); alternative journeys (from the first US women's travel book published in 1682, to works by Cather and Wharton); transience as social reconstruction; and transformative journeys modern, postmodern, and biblical. Name index only. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.