num_pages: 328
description: Starting with the figure of the bold boisterous girl in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with the girl power movement of the 1990s Tomboys is the first full-length critical study of this gender-bending code of female conduct. Michelle Abate uncovers the origins charts the trajectory and traces the literary and cultural transformations that the concept of tomboy has undergone in the United States. Abate focuses on literature including Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding and films such as Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon and Jon Avnet's Fried Green Tomatoes. She also draws on lesser-known texts like E.D.E.N. Southworth's once wildly popular 1859 novel The Hidden Hand Cold War lesbian pulp fiction and New Queer Cinema from the 1990s.
language: English
title: Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History
publisher: Temple University Press