Description
Book SynopsisAt the turn of the twentieth century, realism meant drunken laborers participating in sordid sex and violent acts. As the century progressed, however, the workers seized the pen and forcibly changed the genre. When today''s critics label realism a reactionary attempt to squelch social change, they ignore how working-class writers transformed it to fit their own interests. In doing so, they altered the course of American realism. Working-class women bent to their own purposes several variants of realism, including naturalism, proletarian realism, and magic realism. From the 1903 best-seller by two socialites who posed as ''factory girls'' and wrote about their experiences, to the depression-era authors who tried to include women in the proletariat by writing about sex, to the later writers who incorporated their cultural heritage to create precursors of magic realism, the rise of working-class fiction has helped realism remain fresh, relevant, and lucrative.
Trade Review"Lisa Orr provides a much-needed new look at the multifaceted background of modern American literary realism and a forceful corrective to postmodernist assumptions that the genre is in decline." -- Joyce Warren, Professor of American Literature and Director of Women's Studies at Queens College, CUNY
Lisa Orr's Transforming American Realism forcefully demonstrates how working women have bent the narrative strategies of realistic literature for the sake of telling true tales about the conditions under which they live. Orr's smart, sharp, provocative assessments trace one hundred years of efforts by working-class women writers to counter the narrow narratives used by other the sentimentalize, to sensationalize, and to reject the realities of class, race and ethnicity, sex and gender that define their existence. Her conclusions restore vibrancy to the practice of realistic literature and authenticity to the lives that realistic narratives are capable of portraying once their strengths are unleashed. -- Martha Banta, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles; Author ofHenry James and the Occult: The Great Extensio
Table of ContentsPart 1 Acknowlegments Part 2 Preface Part 3 Introduction Chapter 4 Class and the Uses of Realism Chapter 5 Representing Class in Fact and Fiction: Reformers and Naturalist Narratives Chapter 6 "Cotton Patch Strumpets" and Machinelike Women: Performing Classed Genders Chapter 7 Borders, Banshees, and Laboring Bodies: The Supernatural Invasion of the Material Chapter 8 Like You/Not Like You: The Mulitiple Gestures of the Supernatural Mulitcultural Novel Part 9 Conclusion Part 10 Notes Part 11 Bibliography Part 12 Index
