Bitter Tastes

Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women's Writing

Donna M. Campbell

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780820349442
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Challenging the conventional understandings of literary naturalism defined primarily through its male writers, Donna M. Campbell examines the ways in which American women writers wrote naturalistic fiction and redefined its principles for their own purposes. Bitter Tastes looks at examples from Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, and others and positions their work within the naturalistic canon that arose near the turn of the twentieth century.

Campbell further places these women writers in a broader context by tracing their relationship to early film, which, like naturalism, claimed the ability to represent elemental social truths through a documentary method. Women had a significant presence in early film and constituted 40 percent of scenario writers—in many cases they also served as directors and producers. Campbell explores the features of naturalism that assumed special prominence in women's writing and early film and how the work of these early naturalists diverged from that of their male counterparts in important ways.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Grim Realism and the Culture of Feeling: Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Lillie Chace Wyman
• Chapter 2: The Darwinists: Borderlands, Evolution, and Trauma
• Chapter 3: Bohemian Time: Glasgow, Austin, and Cather
• Chapter 4: Red Kimonos and White Slavery: The Fallen Woman in Film and Print
• Chapter 5: Where Are My Children? Race, Citizenship, and the Stolen Child
• Chapter 6: “Manure Widows” and Middlebrow Fiction: Rural Naturalism in the 1920s
• Chapter 7: Waste, Hoarding, and Secrets: Modernist Naturalism and the Servant’s Body
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index