Genre bending: The work of American women's writing, 1860--1925

This study examines the uses and usefulness of genre classifications by studying novels by American women writers that blend, bend, or borrow from more than one literary genre. By examining the ways women construct themselves as authors in the literary marketplace, this study also explores the ways women authors are retroactively constructed by critics. When reading women's works as participating in a specific genre, it is imperative to remain aware of the fact that many of these definitions did not initially consider women's writing. Just as our perception of the canon has shifted, so must we recognize that generic hybridity allows for new readings of texts by destabilizing traditional means of organizing literary works. As the literary canon has expanded to include more works by women writers, it is critical that we step back and reevaluate the usefulness of the genre classifications upon which we have relied. This study looks at these genre-bending texts and assesses how they work to challenge, subvert, or reinforce the cultural, social, and political milieu from which they arise.;The texts examined in this project include the following: Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches (1863), a novel that can be read as existing on the border between sentimental literature and benevolence literature; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner (1871), an example of benevolence literature and reformist literature with a sentimental leaning where the female character's position of economic influence allows for a discussion of women's roles in an increasingly industrial society; Kate Chopin's At Fault (1890), a novel that relies on multiple genres in order to effectively contain its multiple plots; Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905) and The Custom of the Country (1913), novels that together demonstrate the degree to which an author's use of a single genre, in this case literary naturalism, can evolve during the course of her career; and finally, Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground (1925), a novel that provides a meta-critique of genre by engaging literary naturalism at the moment of transition to modernism.