New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman : Reading with and Against the Grain

New research on Freeman's fiction that challenges and expands earlier feminist readings of the female realmContextualizes key developments in Freeman criticism since 1991Moves beyond an analysis of the short stories for which Freeman is best known to examine her novels Pembroke (1894), Madelon (1896), and The Portion of Labor (1901); stories for youths and uncollected stories; and post-1902 fiction from her late careerUpdates approaches to Freeman by considering ecocriticism, race, labor and class, transnationalismReconsiders periodization: Freeman is read as a modernist and a World War One writer whose long, evolving career questions critical readings of her work within the confines of turn-of-the-century realism and regionalismRaises important questions about single-author scholarship and argues for new critical views that go beyond the single authorInvolves a transatlantic array of scholars (based in the US, the UK, Finland, France, Turkey, Lithuania) at different stages of their career from some long-time specialists of Freeman to some international PhD studentsFreeman is best known today for her short regionalist fiction.

Recently, Freeman studies have taken new turns including ecocriticism, trauma studies, the Gothic, and queer theory.

The essay collection pushes these developments further.

Contributors aim at revisiting and going beyond Freeman's regionalism.

They challenge earlier feminist readings of the female realm by arguing that her short fiction and novels depict women and girls as violent and criminal, suffocating as well as nurturing; they bring to light questions of race and ethnicity that have been conspicuously absent from scholarship on Freeman, as well as issues of class. Because questions of women's work are central to Freeman's oeuvre, this collection discusses Freeman's acumen as a businesswoman herself, a participant as well as a castigator of turn-of-the-century US capitalism.

Finally, essays reconsider the periodization of Freeman by exploring her little acknowledged post-1902 and therefore post-marriage fiction her war stories and her urban stories.