Scare tactics : supernatural fiction by American women / Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American fiction.

Supernatural in literature.

Gothic revival (Literature)--United States.

Gothic revival (Literature).

Ghost stories, American--History and criticism.

Ghost stories, American.

Horror tales, American--History and criticism.

Horror tales, American.

Occultism in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vii, 228 p. )

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2008.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Scare Tactics identifies an important but overlooked tradition of supernatural writing by American women. Jeffrey Weinstock analyzes this tradition as an essentially feminist attempt to imagine alternatives to a world of limited possibilities. In the process, he recovers the lives and works of authors who were important during their lifetimes and in the development of the American literary tradition, but who are not recognized today for their contributions.Between the end of the Civil War and roughly 1930, hundreds of uncanny tales were published by women in the periodical press and in books. These include stories by familiar figures such as Edith Wharton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as by authors almost wholly unknown to twenty-first-century readers, such as Josephine Dodge Bacon, Alice Brown, Emma Frances Dawson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. Focusing on this tradition of female writing offers a corrective to the prevailing belief within American literary scholarship that the uncanny tale, exemplified by the literary productions of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, was displaced after the Civil War by literary realism. Beyond the simple existence of an unacknowledged tradition of uncanny literature by women, Scare Tactics makes a strong case that this body of literature should be read as a specifically feminist literary tradition. Especially intriguing, Weinstock demonstrates, is that women authors repeatedly used Gothic conventions to express discontentment with circumscribed roles for women creating types of political intervention connected to the broader sphere of women's rights activism. Paying attention to these overlooked authors helps us better understand not only the literary marketplace of their time, but also more familiar American Gothicists from Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson to Stephen King.

Contents:

Introduction: The unacknowledged tradition

The ghost in the parlor : Harriet Prescott Spofford, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna M. Hoyt, and Edith Wharton

Queer haunting spaces : Madeline Yale Wynne and Elia Wilkinson Peattie

Ghosts of progress : Alice Cary, Mary Noailles Murfree, Mary Austin, and Edith Wharton

Familial ghosts : Louise Stockton, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Edith Wharton, Josephine Daskam Bacon, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Georgia Wood Pangborn, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Ghosts of desire : Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, and Helen Hull

Ghostly returns : Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gertrude Atherton, and Josephine Daskam Bacon

Coda: The decline of the American female Gothic.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. 199-217) and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9786612698934

9780823241040

0823241041

9781282698932

1282698931

9780823238200

0823238202

9780823229871

0823229874

OCLC:

647876385