New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading with and against the Grain(Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture)

Freeman is best known today for her short regionalist fiction. Recently, Freeman studies have taken new turns including ecocriticism, trauma studies, the Gothic, and queer theory. The essay collection pushes these developments further. Contributors aim at revisiting and going beyond Freeman’s regionalism. They challenge earlier feminist readings of the female realm by arguing that her short fiction and novels depict women and girls as violent and criminal, suffocating as well as nurturing; they bring to light questions of race and ethnicity that have been conspicuously absent from scholarship on Freeman, as well as issues of class. Because questions of women’s work are central to Freeman’s oeuvre, this collection discusses Freeman’s acumen as a businesswoman herself, a participant as well as a castigator of turn-of-the-century US capitalism. Finally, essays reconsider the periodization of Freeman by exploring her little acknowledged post-1902 and therefore post-marriage fiction—her war stories and her urban stories.

Table of Contents:
AcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsReading Freeman Again, Anew – Stephanie Palmer, Myrto Drizou, Cécile Roudeau Kinship Outside of Normative Structures1. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Neighborly Encounters and the Project of Neighborliness – Jana Tigchelaar2. "Her Own Creed of Bloom": The Transcendental Ecofeminism of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman – Susan M. Stone3. "Preposterous Fancies" or a "Plain, Common World?" Queer World-Making in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s "The Prism" (1901) – H.J.E. Champion Violent, Criminal, and Infanticidal: Freeman’s Odd Women 4. The Reign of the Dolls: Violence and the Nonhuman in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman – Donna M. Campbell 5. Transatlantic Lloronas: Infanticide and Gender in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Alexandros Papadiamantis – Myrto Drizou 6. Redefining the New England Nun: A Revisionist Reading in the Context of Pembroke and Irish American Fiction – Aušra Paulauskienė Women’s Work: Capital, Business, Labor7. Hunger Strikes: Queer Naturalism and the Gendering of Solidarity in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s The Portion of Labor　– Justin Rogers-Cooper8. "It Won’t Be Long Before the Grind-Mill in There Will Get Hold of Him": The Theft of Childhood in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s The Portion of Labor – Laura Dawkins9. Literary Businesswoman Extraordinaire – Brent L. Kendrick10. "Deconstructing Upper-Middle-Class Rites and Rituals: Reading Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Stories Alongside Mary Louise Booth’s Harper’s Bazar" – Audrey Fogels Periodization Reconsidered 11. Mobilizing the Great War in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Edgewater People – Daniel Mrozowski 12. A Cacophony of Voices: Freeman’s Modernism – Monika Elbert 13. Underground Influence: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Pastiche of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman – Stephanie Palmer14. Untimely Freeman – Cécile Roudeau Afterword: Why Mary E. Wilkins Freeman? Why Now? Where Next? – Sandra A. Zagarell List of ContributorsIndex

About the Author :
Stephanie Palmer is Senior Lecturer of Nineteenth-Century American Literature at Nottingham Trent University. She has published on regionalism, social class, and transatlanticism. Her books are Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers (Routledge, 2020) and Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class (Lexington Books, 2009). Along with Myrto Drizou and Cécile Roudeau, she inaugurated the Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Society. Myrto Drizou is an Assistant Professor of English at Boğaziçi University in Turkey, where she teaches American and transatlantic literature. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo and has previously taught at Valdosta State University and the University of Illinois at Springfield in the US. She is one of the founding members of the Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Society and has contributed the Introduction to the new edition of Freeman’s The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (Hastings College P, 2015). She has published on numerous fin-de-siècle American authors, including Henry Adams, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Edith Wharton. She is editor of the volume Edith Wharton for the series Critical Insights (Salem P, 2017) and serves as associate editor of the Edith Wharton Review. Her work on Wharton has further appeared in The New Edith Wharton Studies (Cambridge UP, 2019); Gothic Landscapes: Changing Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing Anxieties (Palgrave Macmillan); Critical Insights: American Writers in Exile (Salem P); and 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies. She is also editor of a special issue on the global dimensions of American literary naturalism, which appeared in the New Centennial Review, and is currently working on a study of the archaeological imagination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American female writers. Cécile Roudeau is Professor of American Literature at Université Paris Cité. Her research focuses on the articulation between literature and politics in the long nineteenth century. Her first book, La Nouvelle-Angleterre: Politique d’une écriture (Sorbonne UP, 2012) read New England regionalism (Jewett and Freeman in particular) as a political attempt to repartition the sensible in the US turn to empire. Roudeau is also the author of the first translation of Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs into French (2004/2022). Her research has appeared in ESQ, Leviathan,William James Studies, Revue Française d’Études Américaines, and European Journal of American Studies. She is working on a book project provisionally entitled “Beyond Stateless Literature: Practices of Democratic Power in Nineteenth-Century US Literature.”

Review :
The editors have curated an impressive collection devoted to reexamining Freeman since the second wave feminist reclamation of this author, who, along with others, had faded into obscurity in accordance with changing (masculinist) literary tastes. […] This volume succeeds admirably in restoring increased complexity to the critical appraisal of Freeman’s oeuvre. New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman offers a fresh look at this remarkable 19th-century writer. The essays capture the range of Freeman’s work, "with and against the grain," and the problem with traditional categorization, uncovering alternative modes of critical thinking about a writer whose work spans almost 50 years. This book does not counter the common critical approaches to Freeman’s work, but rather New Perspectives builds upon these readings and creates innovative interpretations. [...] Overall, New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman makes a compelling case for this American author’s relevance not only as a New England regionalist and a late nineteenth/early twentieth-century writer, but also as a forceful female voice that speaks strongly to all readers today. New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading with and against the Grain is a welcome contribution to our understanding of a highly prolific writer whose work deserves the new attention of the kind the book itself represents. [...] all these essays separately and together give us valuable new ways of seeing and reading Freeman both in and out of our own time.