Title: Entitled to the pedestal
First published: 2007
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.
Subjects: History, Women authors, Women and literature, American prose literature, History and criticism, Race in literature, American literature, White authors, White in literature Women, In literature, American literature, women authors, American literature, history and criticism
LC classification: PS