University Press of America
Pages: 148
Trim: 6 x 9½
978-0-7618-3611-7 • Paperback • December 2006 • $42.99 • (£33.00)
Lisa Orr is Associate Professor of English at Utica College in Utica, New York.
Part 1 Acknowlegments
Part 2 Preface
Part 3 Introduction
Chapter 4 Class and the Uses of Realism
Chapter 5 Representing Class in Fact and Fiction: Reformers and Naturalist Narratives
Chapter 6 "Cotton Patch Strumpets" and Machinelike Women: Performing Classed Genders
Chapter 7 Borders, Banshees, and Laboring Bodies: The Supernatural Invasion of the Material
Chapter 8 Like You/Not Like You: The Mulitiple Gestures of the Supernatural Mulitcultural Novel
Part 9 Conclusion
Part 10 Notes
Part 11 Bibliography
Part 12 Index
"Lisa Orr provides a much-needed new look at the multifaceted background of modern American literary realism and a forceful corrective to postmodernist assumptions that the genre is in decline."
— Joyce Warren, Professor of American Literature and Director of Women's Studies at Queens College, CUNY
Lisa Orr's Transforming American Realism forcefully demonstrates how working women have bent the narrative strategies of realistic literature for the sake of telling true tales about the conditions under which they live. Orr's smart, sharp, provocative assessments trace one hundred years of efforts by working-class women writers to counter the narrow narratives used by other the sentimentalize, to sensationalize, and to reject the realities of class, race and ethnicity, sex and gender that define their existence. Her conclusions restore vibrancy to the practice of realistic literature and authenticity to the lives that realistic narratives are capable of portraying once their strengths are unleashed.
— Martha Banta, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles; Author ofHenry James and the Occult: The Great Extensio