Description: Freeman is best known today for her short regionalist fiction. Recently, Freeman studies have taken new turns including ecocriticism, trauma studies, the Gothic, and queer theory. The essay collection pushes these developments further. Contributors aim at revisiting and going beyond Freeman's regionalism. They challenge earlier feminist readings of the female realm by arguing that her short fiction and novels depict women and girls as violent and criminal, suffocating as well as nurturing; they bring to light questions of race and ethnicity that have been conspicuously absent from scholarship on Freeman, as well as issues of class. Because questions of women's work are central to Freeman's oeuvre, this collection discusses Freeman's acumen as a businesswoman herself, a participant as well as a castigator of turn-of-the-century US capitalism. Finally, essays reconsider the periodization of Freeman by exploring her little acknowledged post-1902 and therefore post-marriage fiction--her war stories and her urban stories.
Brief description: Stephanie Palmer is Senior Lecturer of Nineteenth-Century American Literature at Nottingham Trent University. She has published on regionalism, social class, and transatlanticism. Her books are Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers (Routledge, 2020) and Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class (Lexington Books, 2009). Along with Myrto Drizou and Cécile Roudeau, she inaugurated the Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Society.
Review Quotes: The editors have curated an impressive collection devoted to reexamining Freeman since the second wave feminist reclamation of this author, who, along with others, had faded into obscurity in accordance with changing (masculinist) literary tastes. [...] This volume succeeds admirably in restoring increased complexity to the critical appraisal of Freeman's oeuvre.--Wendy Ryden, Long Island University Post "Edith Wharton Review"