Parlor Radical

Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism

Jean Pfaelzer

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780822974987
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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 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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: History, Narrative, and Subjectivity
• 2. The Terrible Question of "Life in the Iron-Mills"
• 3. The Common Story of Margret Howth
• 4. The Savage Necessity of Abolition and Civil War
• 5. The Soul Starvation of the Domestic Woman
• 6. Race Reconstruction, the Discourse of Sentiment: Waiting for the Verdict
• 7. Nature, Nurture, and Nationalism: "A Faded Leaf of History"
• 8. The Politics of Nature: "The Yates of Black Mountain"
• 9. To Be, to Do, and to Suffer: The New Woman
• Notes
• Index