New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs

This collection of essays rethinks Sarah Orne Jewett's contribution to American literature.

June Howard (Edited by)

9780521415743, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 May 1994

136 pages
22.3 x 14.7 x 1.5 cm, 0.296 kg

"Well-written and containing useful summaries of recent criticism, this work is valuable for anyone engaged with Jewett, feminist criticism, or regional writing. It should be the basis for more detailed examinations of 19th- and 20th-century visions of community. Recommended for all libraries." M. L. Robertson, Choice

This is a collection of new essays on one of the most important works of New England local colour fiction, The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett. It builds on feminist literary scholarship that affirms the importance and value of Jewett's work, but goes beyond previously published studies by offering an analysis of how race, nationalism, and the literary marketplace shape her narrative. The volume constitutes a major rethinking of Jewett's contribution to American literature, and will be of broad interest to the fields of American literary studies, feminist cultural criticism, and American studies.

1. Introduction: Sarah Orne Jewett and the traffic in words June Howard
2. Country's Portrayal of community and the exclusion of difference Sandra Abelson Zagarell
3. Gender and American realism in The Country of the Pointed Firs Michael Davitt Bell
4. Material culture, empire, and Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, Elizabeth Ammons
5. Regionalism and nationalism in Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs Susan Gillman.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]