Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels

This study proposes new interpretive strategies for nineteenth-century American women's novels. Harris contends that women in the nineteenth century read subversively, 'processing texts according to gender based imperatives. Beginning with Susannah Rowson's ending with Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913), Harris scans white, middle-class women's writing throughout the nineteenth century. In the process she both explores reading behaviour and formulates a literary history for mainsteam nineteenth-century American women's fiction. Through most of the twentieth century, women's novels of the earlier period have been denigrated as conventional, sentimental, and overwritten. Harris shows that these conditions are actually narrative strategies, rooted in cultural imperatives and, paradoxically, integral to the later development of women's texts that call for women' independence.Harris, Susan K. is the author of 'Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels', published 1990 under ISBN 9780521382885 and ISBN 0521382882.