Through the window, out the door
Subtitle: women's narratives of departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion
By: Janis P. Stout.
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Tuscaloosa
Language: eng
Number of pages: 312
Subjects: American fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism.; Women and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century.; American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Separation (Psychology) in literature.; Women travelers in literature.; Farewells in literature.; Travel in literature.; Narration (Rhetoric); Home in literature.
Description: An important moment in many novels and poems by American women writers occurs when a central character looks out a window or walks out the door of a house. These acts of departure serve to convey such values as the rejection of constraining social patterns, the search for individual fulfillment, and the entry into the political.

Janis Stout examines such moments and related patterns of venture and travel in the fiction of five major American novelists of the 20th century: Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion.

Moving between texts and between texts and contexts, Stout shows how women writers have envisioned the walls of both physical and social structures (including genres) as permeable boundaries, drawing on both a rhetoric of liberation and a rhetoric of domesticity to construct narrative arguments for women's right to move freely between the two.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-301) and index.
This volume is an extension and rebuttal of earlier book: The journey narrative in American literature, published in 1983.