Willa Cather
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
So how does Fear of Flying stand up as literature today? In my view, very well. Although she may not have known it, Jong was writing in a long tradition of American female novelists who used the semiautobiographical form of the Kunstlerroman (artist's novel) both to tell the story of their generation, and to redeem women's fiction from its demeaning associations with sentimentality, domesticity, and self-sacrifice. In novels from Mary Virginia Terhune's Alone (1853) and Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1855) to Mary Hunter Austin's A Woman of Genius (1912), Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark (1915), and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), writers described the struggles of gifted women with their families, with their societies, and with themselves. Elaine Showalter via [1]
