Tomboys
Tomboys

Author: Michelle Ann Abate

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2008-06-28

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1592137245

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Starting with the figure of the bold, boisterous girl in the mid-19th century and ending with the “girl power” movement of the 1990’s, Tomboys is the first full-length critical study of this gender-bending code of female conduct. Michelle Abate uncovers the origins, charts the trajectory, and traces the literary and cultural transformations that the concept of “tomboy” has undergone in the United States. Abate focuses on literature including Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding and films such as Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon and Jon Avnet's Fried Green Tomatoes. She also draws onlesser-known texts like E.D.E.N. Southworth's once wildly popular 1859 novel The Hidden Hand, Cold War lesbian pulp fiction, and New Queer Cinema from the 1990s. Tomboys also explores the gender and sexual dynamics of tomboyism, and offers intriguing discussions of race and ethnicity's role in the construction of the enduring cultural archetype. Abate’s insightful analysis provides useful, thought-provoking connections between different literary works and eras. The result demystifies this cultural phenomenon and challenges readers to consider tomboys in a whole new light.

Woman's Fiction
Woman's Fiction

Author: Nina Baym

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780252062858

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This reissue of the pioneering and standard book on antebellum women's domestic novels contains a new introduction situating the book in the context of important recent developments in the study of women's writing. Nina Baym considers 130 novels by 48 women, focusing on the works of a dozen especially productive and successful writers. Woman's Fiction is a major-work in nineteenth-century literature, reexamining changes in the literary canon and the meaning of sentimentalism, while responding to current critical discussions of 'the body' in literary texts. ''Informative and stimulating. . . . Nina Baym has undertaken a systematic analysis of that nineteenth-century American fiction normally dismissed as at best trivially sentimental. . . . Woman's Fiction offers a fresh perspective on a largely forgotten body of literature.'' -- American Literature''Perceives in the fiction of, by, and for women in the period stated a popular genre that made a particular kind of feminist avowal for the times, one that rejected the concept of helplessness and urged the application of intelligence and courage to trying situations. . . . Baym marshals ample supporting evidence from the outpouring of such fiction.'' - ALA Booklist