California dreams and American contradictions : women writers and the Western ideal /
"Monique McDade's study examines a group of diverse women writers of the American West from an intersectional standpoint to understand the progressive narratives the West tells about itself"--
Saved in:
| Author / Creator: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | eBook Electronic |
| Language: | English |
| Imprint: | Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [2023] |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Click here for full text at Project MUSE |
| Summary: | "Monique McDade's study examines a group of diverse women writers of the American West from an intersectional standpoint to understand the progressive narratives the West tells about itself"-- California Dreams and American Contradictions establishes a genealogy of western American women writers publishing between 1870 and 1965 to argue that both white women and women of color regionalized dominant national literary trends to negotiate the contradictions between an American liberal individualism and American equality. Monique McDade analyzes works by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sui Sin Far, and a previously unstudied African American writer, Eva Rutland, to trace an archive of western American women writers who made visible what dominant genres subsumed under images of American progress and westward expansion.<br> <br> <br> <br> Read together these writers provide new entry points into the political debates that have plagued the United States since the nation's founding and that set the precedent for westward expansion. Their romances, regional sketches, memoirs, and journalism point to the inherently antagonistic relationship between a Rooseveltian rugged individualism that encouraged an Anglo male-dominated West and the progressive equality and opportunity the West seemingly promised disenfranchised citizens. The writers included in California Dreams and American Contradictions challenged literature's role in creating regional division, conformist communities that support nationally sponsored images of gendered, ethnic, and immigrant others, and liberal histories validated through a strategic vocabulary rooted in "freedom," "equality," and "progress." |
|---|---|
| Item Description: | Print version record. |
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (x, 252 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 1496235282 1496235290 9781496235282 9781496235299 |
| Author Notes: |