Landscapes of the new West : gender and geography in contemporary women's writing / Krista Comer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Comer, Krista.

Series:

Cultural studies of the United States

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--West (U.S.)--History and criticism.

American literature.

Women and literature--West (U.S.)--History--20th century.

Women and literature.

History.

American literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

American literature--Women authors.

West (U.S.)--In literature.

West (U.S.).

Landscapes in literature.

Geography in literature.

Physical Description:

x, 302 pages ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [1999]

Summary:

In the early 1970s, empowered by the civil rights and women's movements, a new group of women writers began speaking to the American public. Their topic, broadly defined, was the postmodern American West. By the mid-1980s, their combined works made for a bona fide literary groundswell in both critical and commercial terms. However, as Krista Comer notes, despite the attentions of publishers, the media, and millions of readers, literary scholars have rarely addressed this movement or its writers.

Too many critics, Comer argues, still enamored of western images that are both masculine and antimodern, have been slow to reckon with the emergence of a new, far more "feminine, " postmodern, multiracial, and urban west. Here, she calls for a redesign of the field of western cultural studies, one that engages issues of gender and race and is more self-conscious about space itself -- especially that cherished symbol of western "authenticity, " open landscape. Surveying works by Joan Didion, Wanda Coleman, Maxine Hon Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Pain Houston, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Mary Clearman Blew, Comer shows how these and other contemporary women writers have mapped new geographical imaginations upon the cultural and social spaces of today's American West.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [267]-289) and index.

ISBN:

0807824852

0807848131

OCLC:

40126938