Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing. By Donna M. Campbell. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press. 2016. xiv, 386 pp. Cloth, $64.95; paper, $34.95; e-book, $64.95.
This study revises the critical understanding of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century US literary naturalism. The book brings together the likes of Edith Wharton, Rebecca Harding Davis, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow with a number of lesser-known women novelists, magazine writers, journalists, memoirists, and film workers to examine the “unruly naturalism” of these authors’ work that intersects with as it expands the traditionally male-dominated canon of the period. Arguing that this diversity of voices offers unique and sometimes counterintuitive treatments of determinism, decline, desire, and objectivity, Campbell proffers seven detail-rich chapters to reconstruct an inclusive cultural context that has long been overlooked.
Becoming Willa Cather: Creation and Career. By Daryl W. Palmer. Reno: Univ. of Nevada Press. 2019....
