Personal and the Political in American Working-Class Literature, 1850–1939

Defining the Radical Romance

AvLaurie J. C. Cella

Inbunden, Engelska, 2019

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Beskrivning

As working women invaded the public space of the factory in the nineteenth century, they challenged Victorian notions of female domesticity and chastity. With virtue at the forefront of discussions regarding working women, aspects of working-class women’s culture—fashion, fiction, and dance halls—become vivid signifiers for moral impropriety, and attempts to censure these activities become overt attempts to censure female sexuality in the workplace. The Personal and the Political in American Working-Class Literature, 1850–1939 argues that these informal and often ignored “trifles” of female community provided the building blocks for female solidarity in the workplace. While most critical approaches to working-class fiction emphasize female suffering rather than agency, this book argues that working women themselves viewed aspects of consumer culture and new avenues for courtship as extensions of their rights as breadwinners. The strike itself is an intense moment of political upheaval that lends itself to more extensive personal and sexual freedoms. Through its analysis of strike novels, this book provides a fuller picture of working-class women as they simultaneously navigate new identities as “working ladies” and enter the dramatic and sometimes violent world of labor activism. This book is recommended for scholars of literary studies, women’s studies, and US history.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2019-09-06
Mått:160 x 229 x 20 mm
Vikt:472 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Innovation and Activism in American Women's Writing
Antal sidor:196
Förlag:Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN:9781498581202

Utforska kategorier

Genusvetenskap inom Samhälle och politik
Amerikas historia inom Historia och arkeologi
Litteraturvetenskap inom Skönlitteratur

Mer om författaren

Laurie Cella is associate professor of English at Shippensburg University.

Recensioner i media

A welcome challenge to conventional wisdom assuming the essential conservatism of romantic narratives, Radical Romance offers a fresh take on the social and symbolic functions of the heterosexual romance plot. Laurie Cella's nuanced readings are carefully researched and grounded in the rhetorical and material contexts of working-class activism and debates about working-class women in the US. Combining and reformulating critical thought on romance narrative and on proletariat fiction, Radical Romance extends and deepens our understanding of both. In Cella's hands, old stories are made new again.

Innehållsförteckning

Acknowledgments IntroductionChapter 1: The Lowell Experiment: Finery, Chastity, and an Emerging Working-class CultureChapter 2: Maud Matchin: A Working-Class American Beauty in John Hay’s The Breadwinners (1896)Chapter 3: Strikers at the Ball: Radical Romances of the Great Shirtwaist Strike, Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker (1909) and Comrade Yetta (1913)Chapter 4: Romance on the Picket Line: Mary Heaton Vorse’s Strike! (1930) and Dorothy Myra Page’s Gathering Storm (1932)Chapter 5: Violence and Female Sexuality in Sherwood Anderson’s Beyond Desire (1932) and William Rollins’s The Shadow Before (1934)Chapter 6: Romance as Redemption in Olive Tilford Dargan’s Call Home the Heart (1932), Stone Came Rolling (1935) and Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread (1932)ConclusionWorks Cited