New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - (Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture) (Hardcover)

About the Book

New research on Freeman's fiction that challenges and expands earlier feminist readings of the female realm

Book Synopsis

Freeman is best known today for her short regionalist fiction. Recently, Freeman studies have taken new turns including ecocriticism, trauma studies, the Gothic, and queer theory. The essay collection pushes these developments further. Contributors aim at revisiting and going beyond Freeman's regionalism. They challenge earlier feminist readings of the female realm by arguing that her short fiction and novels depict women and girls as violent and criminal, suffocating as well as nurturing; they bring to light questions of race and ethnicity that have been conspicuously absent from scholarship on Freeman, as well as issues of class. Because questions of women's work are central to Freeman's oeuvre, this collection discusses Freeman's acumen as a businesswoman herself, a participant as well as a castigator of turn-of-the-century US capitalism. Finally, essays reconsider the periodization of Freeman by exploring her little acknowledged post-1902 and therefore post-marriage fiction--her war stories and her urban stories.

From the Back Cover

New research on Freeman's fiction that challenges and expands earlier readings of regionalism and feminist politics Whilst Freeman is best known for her short regionalist fiction, recent studies have delved into new areas including the Gothic, ecocriticism, posthuman studies, trauma studies and queer theory. This collection of essays shows that Freeman resists many of the frames that have brought her and other (women) writers back to visibility. The essays o challenge feminist readings of the female realm: Freeman's women are suffocating as well as nurturing o highlight questions of race and ethnicity that have been conspicuously absent from scholarship on Freeman o show how her fiction engaged with issues of class, labour politics, and women's work: Freeman was a participant in and castigator of US capitalism o situate her in a world context and unsettle periodisation by exploring her neglected post-marriage fiction, war stories and urban stories. Collectively, these essays expand our sense of her work, reading with and against the grain of earlier readings of Freeman, feminism, regionalism and American literary culture. Stephanie Palmer is Senior Lecturer of Nineteenth-Century American Literature at Nottingham Trent University Myrto Drizou is Assistant Professor of English and American Literature at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul Cécile Roudeau is Professor of American Literature at Université Paris Cité

Review Quotes

New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading with and against the Grain is a welcome contribution to our understanding of a highly prolific writer whose work deserves the new attention of the kind the book itself represents. [...] all these essays separately and together give us valuable new ways of seeing and reading Freeman both in and out of our own time.--Bridget Bennett, University of Leeds "Transatlantica"

The editors have curated an impressive collection devoted to reexamining Freeman since the second wave feminist reclamation of this author, who, along with others, had faded into obscurity in accordance with changing (masculinist) literary tastes. [...] This volume succeeds admirably in restoring increased complexity to the critical appraisal of Freeman's oeuvre.--Wendy Ryden, Long Island University Post "Edith Wharton Review"

This book does not counter the common critical approaches to Freeman's work, but rather New Perspectives builds upon these readings and creates innovative interpretations. [...] Overall, New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman makes a compelling case for this American author's relevance not only as a New England regionalist and a late nineteenth/early twentieth-century writer, but also as a forceful female voice that speaks strongly to all readers today.--Cara Erdheim Kilgallen "Studies in American Naturalism"

New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman offers a fresh look at this remarkable 19th-century writer. The essays capture the range of Freeman's work, "with and against the grain," and the problem with traditional categorization, uncovering alternative modes of critical thinking about a writer whose work spans almost 50 years.--Leah Blatt Glasser, Mount Holyoke College

About the Author

Stephanie Palmer is Senior Lecturer of Nineteenth-Century American Literature at Nottingham Trent University. She has published on regionalism, social class, and transatlanticism. Her books are Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers (Routledge, 2020) and Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class (Lexington Books, 2009). Along with Myrto Drizou and Cécile Roudeau, she inaugurated the Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Society.

Myrto Drizou is an Assistant Professor of English at Boğaziçi University in Turkey, where she teaches American and transatlantic literature. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo and has previously taught at Valdosta State University and the University of Illinois at Springfield in the US. She is one of the founding members of the Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Society and has contributed the Introduction to the new edition of Freeman's The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (Hastings College P, 2015). She has published on numerous fin-de-siècle American authors, including Henry Adams, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Edith Wharton. She is editor of the volume Edith Wharton for the series Critical Insights (Salem P, 2017) and serves as associate editor of the Edith Wharton Review. Her work on Wharton has further appeared in The New Edith Wharton Studies (Cambridge UP, 2019); Gothic Landscapes: Changing Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing Anxieties (Palgrave Macmillan); Critical Insights: American Writers in Exile (Salem P); and 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies. She is also editor of a special issue on the global dimensions of American literary naturalism, which appeared in the New Centennial Review, and is currently working on a study of the archaeological imagination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American female writers.

Cécile Roudeau is Professor of American Literature at Université Paris Cité. Her research focuses on the articulation between literature and politics in the long nineteenth century. Her first book, La Nouvelle-Angleterre: Politique d'une écriture (Sorbonne UP, 2012) read New England regionalism (Jewett and Freeman in particular) as a political attempt to repartition the sensible in the US turn to empire. Roudeau is also the author of the first translation of Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs into French (2004/2022). Her research has appeared in ESQ, Leviathan, William James Studies, Revue Française d'Études Américaines, and European Journal of American Studies. She is working on a book project provisionally entitled "Beyond Stateless Literature: Practices of Democratic Power in Nineteenth-Century US Literature."