"Modernist" women writers and narrative art
By: Kathleen Wheeler.
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 220
Subjects: American fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism; English fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism; Narration (Rhetoric) -- History -- 20th century; Modernism (Literature) -- United States; Modernism (Literature) -- Great Britain; Women and literature -- English-speaking countries
Description: This book is an examination of the narrative strategies and stylistic devices of modernist writers and of earlier writers normally associated with late realism. In the case of the latter, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin and Willa Cather are shown to have engaged in an ironic critique of realism, by exploring the inadequacies of this form to express human experience, and by revealing hidden, and contradictory, assumptions.

By drawing upon insights from feminist theory, deconstruction and revisions of new historicism, and by restoring aspects of formalist analysis, Kathleen Wheeler traces the details of these various dialogues with the literary tradition etched into structural, stylistic and thematic elements of the novels and short stories discussed.

These seven writers are not only discussed in detail, they are also related to a literary tradition of dozens of other women writers of the twentieth century, as Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Stevie Smith and Jane Bowles are shown to take the developments of the earlier three writers into full modernism.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 208-215) and index.