Nineteenth-Century Southern Women Writers

Name: Nineteenth-Century Southern Women Writers
Brand: Taylor & Francis

Taylor & Francis

The essays in this book explore the role of Grace King\u2019s fiction in the movement of American literature from local color and realism to modernism and show that her work exposes a postbellum New Orleans that is fragmented socially, politically, and linguistically. In her introduction, Melissa Walker Heidari examines selections from King\u2019s journals and letters as views into her journey toward a modernist aesthetic\u2014what King describes in one passage as \""the continual voyage I made.\"" Sirpa Salenius sees King\u2019s fiction as a challenge to dominant conceptualizations of womanhood and a reaction against female oppression and heteronormativity. In his analysis of \""An Affair of the Heart,\"" Ralph J. Poole highlights the rhetoric of excess that reveals a social satire debunking sexual and racial double standards. Ineke Bockting shows the modernist aspects of King\u2019s fiction through a stylistic analysis which explores spatial, temporal, biological, psychological, social.