Surviving the Crossing: (Im)migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen

by Jessica Rabin

Overview

By examining the fiction of three women modernists—Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen—this book complicates binary paradigms of national, gender, and ethnic identities in the interwar period. In place of essentializing categories of identity, Jessica Rabin explores the liberating and dislocating ramifications of using multiple subject positions as a means of representing identity. While these three authors have been studied in non-intersecting categories (pioneer literature, high modernism, and the Harlem Renaissance, respectively), Jessica Rabin traces their similarities, showing how the dispersal of fixed identities are facilitated by the language of fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415971188
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/26/2004
Series:	Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jessica Rabin is Associate Professor of English at Anne Arundel Community College. Her teaching and research interests include modernism, ethnic American literature, and women's studies.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: A Sense of Selves 2. "The Peculiar Combination of Elements Long Familiar": Willa Cather 3. Fiction Was Another Way of Telling the Truth: Gertrude Stein 4. The Mixedness of Things: Nella Larsen 5. Conclusion: Other Countries, Other Romances Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"[Rabin's] study is ultimately worthy of praise; it aptly points the way toward new forms of scholarship that attempt to push on the boundaries of identity-based literary categorization." — Matthew Lavin, University of Iowa, Western American Literature

From the Publisher