California Dreams and American Contradictions
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A01=Monique McDade
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American West
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Dime Novel
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Eva Rutland
Female Author
Fiction
Helen Hunt Jackson
Individualism
Journalism
Language_English
Literary Criticism
Literature
Magazine Fiction
Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton
Memoir
Mrs. Spring Fragrance
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Pacific States
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Ramona
Romance Novel
softlaunch
Sui Sin Far
The Squatter and the Don
Travel Guide
Twentieth Century Literature
Western
Western Literature
Westward Expansion
When We Were Colored: A Mother's Story
When We Were Colored: A Mother’s Story
Who Would Have Thought It
Women Author
Women's Literature
Women's Studies
Women’s Literature
Women’s Studies
Product details
- ISBN 9781496232960
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Mar 2023
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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California Dreams and American Contradictions establishes a genealogy of western American women writers publishing between 1870 and 1965 to argue that both white women and women of color regionalized dominant national literary trends to negotiate the contradictions between an American liberal individualism and American equality. Monique McDade analyzes works by MarÍa Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sui Sin Far, and a previously unstudied African American writer, Eva Rutland, to trace an archive of western American women writers who made visible what dominant genres subsumed under images of American progress and westward expansion.
Read together these writers provide new entry points into the political debates that have plagued the United States since the nation’s founding and that set the precedent for westward expansion. Their romances, regional sketches, memoirs, and journalism point to the inherently antagonistic relationship between a Rooseveltian rugged individualism that encouraged an Anglo male–dominated West and the progressive equality and opportunity the West seemingly promised disenfranchised citizens. The writers included in California Dreams and American Contradictions challenged literature’s role in creating regional division, conformist communities that support nationally sponsored images of gendered, ethnic, and immigrant others, and liberal histories validated through a strategic vocabulary rooted in “freedom,” “equality,” and “progress.”
Read together these writers provide new entry points into the political debates that have plagued the United States since the nation’s founding and that set the precedent for westward expansion. Their romances, regional sketches, memoirs, and journalism point to the inherently antagonistic relationship between a Rooseveltian rugged individualism that encouraged an Anglo male–dominated West and the progressive equality and opportunity the West seemingly promised disenfranchised citizens. The writers included in California Dreams and American Contradictions challenged literature’s role in creating regional division, conformist communities that support nationally sponsored images of gendered, ethnic, and immigrant others, and liberal histories validated through a strategic vocabulary rooted in “freedom,” “equality,” and “progress.”
Monique McDade is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Kalamazoo College.
