Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism
by Jean Pfaelzer
On This Page
Description
Rebecca Harding Davis was a prominent author of radical social fiction during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In stories that combine realism with sentimentalism, Davis confronted a wide range of contemporary American issues, giving voice to working women, prostitutes, wives seeking divorce, celibate utopians, and female authors. Davis broke down distinctions between the private and the public worlds, distinctions that trapped women in the ideology of domesticity. By engaging show more current strategies in literary hermeneutics with a strong sense of historical radicalism in the Gilded Age, Jean Pfaelzer reads Davis through the public issues that she forcefully inscribed in her fiction. In this study, Davis's realistic narratives actively construct a coherent social work, not in a fictional vacuum but in direct engagement with the explosive movements of social change from the Civil War through the turn of the century. show lessTags
Members
- Recently Added By
Author Information
5 Works 202 Members
Jean Pfaelzer is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Delaware. She is author of The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896: The Politics of Form and Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism, among other books
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Literature Studies and Criticism
- DDC/MDS
- 813.4 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English Later 19th Century 1861-1900
- LCC
- PS1517 .Z5 .P48 — Language and Literature American literature American literature Individual authors 19th century
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 6
- Popularity
- 3,041,143
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
