Entitled to the pedestal
Subtitle: place, race, and progress in white Southern women's writing, 1920-1945
By: Nghana Tamu Lewis.
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Iowa City, [IA]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 208
ISBN-13: 9781587295294
Description: Lewis offers a close reading of the works and private correspondences, essays, and lectures of five southern white women writers: Julia Peterkin, Gwen Bristow, Caroline Gordon, Willa Cather, and Lillian Smith. At the core of this work is a sophisticated reexamination of the myth of southern white womanhood. Lewis overturns the conventional argument that white women were passive and pedestal-bound. Instead, she argues that these figures were complicit in the day-to-day dynamics of power and authorship and stood to gain much from these arrangements at the expense of others.