Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Realism, sentimentalism, and popular fiction

During a forty-year career Mary E. Wilkins Freeman wrote one motion picture script, three plays, three volumes of poetry, fourteen novels, twenty-two volumes of short stories, and over seventy uncollected short stories and prose essays. Most of this work remains relatively unexplored. A reading of representative examples of Freeman's fiction in their sociocultural and generic contexts leads to a description and estimate of Freeman's corpus that transcends the limited acclaim for her two early short story collections, A Humble Romance (1887) and A New England Nun (1891). American local color literature is often described as a nostalgic response to rapid social change. A second critical trope about this regional literature dominated by the presence of women authors is that it often fails because it cloaks itself in the guise of realism but retreats into the ideology and conventions of the feminine and sentimental. This study attempts a historical, cultural, and generic reading of Freeman's diverse fiction that productively turns these critical commonplaces upside-down and moves beyond their limitations. Freeman's work needs to be understood as an investigation of sentimentalism and a deployment of its strategies for literary purposes.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2011

Author dc:creator

• Shaw, Stuart Bradley

Contributors dc:contributor

• Baym, Nina

• Women's Studies
• Literature, American

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 1991 Shaw, Stuart Bradley

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

AAI9136728
(UMI)AAI9136728

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/19138