Overview

Judith Fryer's study of novelists Edith Wharton and Willa Cather is a rich examination of the actual and imagined spaces women inhabit, perceive, and create. Turning to the period of """"America's coming of age,"""" Fryer offers a woman-centered inquiry into an era whose traditional landmarks are the frontier, the rise of the city, and World War I. Fryer draws her analysis from history, philosophy, environmental psychology, anthropology, sociology, and geography as well as from literature, architechure, and painting. The book's conceptual bonds are women's structures of the period: the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and the 1915 feminist utopian community, Herland, imagined by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Focusing on the experience of women, Fryer presents a series of meditations that are concerned with the structures of fantasy -- a plan for a house, a room, a set of furnishings, a landscape, a story. Offering new readings of the fictions of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather that depart from existing biographical or psychological analyses, Fryer provides an original view of the meaning of space for such educated women. Wharton and Cather departed from the customary """"American"""" expressions of the dominant culture, Fryer argues, to explore and inscribe their own experiences. She focuses on their imaginative structures, from Wharton's meticulously conceived interiors, which include all that the eye can encompass, to Cather's unfurnished rooms and landscapes, which are her physical and spiritual correlatives. In demonstrating the relationship between the spaces women inhabit and the language of their imaginative creations, Fryer brings new meaning to the ongoing investigations of creativity versus environment. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

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9780807841358

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A benchmark inquiry, Felicitous Space ranges over a vast landscape of significant detail, probing deeply into the artistic configurations of Wharton and Cather, and through them into the shapes and meanings of fictional space. --John R. Stilgoe, Harvard University

Judith Fryer offers us an illuminating exploration of how two American woman writers, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, managed to escape the cramping limitations that men had imposed on their lives.--Louis Auchincloss, New York Review of Books| A benchmark inquiry, Felicitous Space ranges over a vast landscape of significant detail, probing deeply into the artistic configurations of Wharton and Cather, and through them into the shapes and meanings of fictional space. --John R. Stilgoe, Harvard University

Author Information

Judith Fryer Davidov, professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is the author of The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel.

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