Title: Parlor Radical
Subtitle: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism
First published: 1996
Description: Rebecca Harding Davis was a prominent author of radical social fiction during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In stories that combine realism with sentimentalism, Davis confronted a wide range of contemporary American issues, giving voice to working women, slaves, freedmen, fishermen, prostitutes, wives seeking divorce, celibate utopians, and female authors.

Moreover, in her stunning blend of sentiment, gritty detail, and vernacular fiction, Davis broke down distinctions between the private and public worlds, distinctions that trapped women in the ideology of domesticity. In the first study to consider Davis as a literary activist, Jean Pfaelzer describes how Davis fulfilled her own charge to women authors to write "the inner life and history of their time with a power which shall make that time alive for future ages.".

By engaging current strategies in literary hermeneutics with a strong sense of historical radicalism in the Gilded Age, Pfaelzer reads Davis through the public issues that this major nineteenth-century writer forcefully inscribes in her fiction. In Pfaelzer's study, Davis's realistic narratives actively construct a coherent social work, not in a fictional vacuum but in direct engagement with the explosive movements of social change from the Civil War through the turn of the century.
Subjects: History, Women and literature, National characteristics, American, in literature, Literature and society, Radicalism, Criticism and interpretation, Social problems in literature, Social realism in literature, Radicalism in literature, Women, political activity, United states, politics and government, biography
Places: United States
People: Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910)
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: PS1517.Z5 P48 1996