Donna Campbell

• Washington State University

Charmian Kittredge London is best remembered today as the second wife of Jack London (1876–1916), described at best as his beloved “Mate-Woman,” in Clarice Stasz’s American Dreamers and Jack London’s Women, and at worst as the devious other woman who led to his estrangement from his children, in Irving Stone’s Sailor on Horseback. In this sympathet...

When the proud town councilors of fictional Osage, Oklahoma, in Edna Ferber's Cimarron (1929) commission a popular sculptor to portray Sabra Cravat as a pioneer, they follow a popular early twentieth-century myth that white women in sunbonnets, not white men with rifles, were the real force that “tamed” the West. In Fictions of Western Domesticity:...

This chapter provides a brief definitional overview of naturalism, its critical reception in the twentieth century, and new directions of scholarship in the twenty‐first century. The chapter also includes separate sections on Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and Jack London, including biographical information, an assessment of the aut...

The New Edith Wharton Studies - edited by Jennifer Haytock December 2019

In 1915, Mary Austin (1868-1934) wrote to her old friend and fellow writer Jack London (1876-1916) to upbraid him for failing to write a novel that truthfully depicted the life of a modern woman, and by extension, companionate marriage. Companionate marriage was a rational system based in idealism, tailor-made for the Progressive Era and for revolu...

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 Glasgo...

Nearly twenty years before he published The Damnation of Theron Ware, a young Harold Frederic published an essay called “Christianity and Civilization” in which he declared the idea of Christian Civilization to be an oxymoron. With “the triumphs of civilization in which we exult to-day,” he writes, “Christianity has nothing to do.” In fact, religio...

Few twentieth-century American authors have been as frequently interpreted—and misinterpreted—by biographers as has Jack London. As Jeanne Campbell Reesman sums up the shortcomings of London biographies in a recent essay for Resources for American Literary Study, London's colorful life story attracted some "hero-worshippers" among those who knew hi...

This essay provides an overview and reinterpretation of American literary naturalism as practiced by classic naturalists Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London, by later naturalists such as Phillips and Steinbeck, and by those whose contributions to naturalism deserve more recognition, among them women writers and writers of...

In “The Naturalism of Mr. Dreiser” (1915), the critic Stuart P. Sherman found nothing to praise in Theodore Dreiser's naturalism, which, Sherman complains, “drives home the great truth that man is essentially an animal” impelled by a “jungle-motive,” with protagonists that acquire not wisdom but “sensations.” Treating morality as an innate feature...

References and Further Reading

Postwestern Cultures addresses "the highly charged and continually shifting meanings" of a space that occupies an outsized, even mythic place in the national imaginary: the American West. The essays in this collection do not focus on this myth or its deconstruction in recent history, criticism, and media; rather, they set out to question, through a...

In the first few pages of Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture, Anita Clair Fellman introduces the Laura Ingalls Wilder of familiar legend: the white-haired farm woman who sits writing the story of her pioneer childhood on lined school paper, and, by dint of her untutored artistry and the homespun authenticit...

The republication of Kate Chopin's The Awakening in Per Seyersted's The Complete Works of Kate Chopin in 1969 after decades of comparative neglect established The Awakening as a major work, one that quickly became canonical in feminist literary studies. The same cannot be said, however, for the other novel in the volume: At Fault, Chopin's first no...

In October 1859, George William Curtis, editor of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, attempted to define for his readers the concept of Bohemia. Alluding to both the freedom that Bohemia embodied and anxiety about the threat it posed to bourgeois life, he pronounced that "Bohemia is the realm of vagabondage[,] . . . a fairy land upon the hard earth. ....

The Beginnings of RegionalismRegional Realism or Local Color FictionThe “Realism War,” the Retreat into Romance, and the Decline of Local Color

Legacy 21.1 (2004) 96-97 With the publication of their anthology American Women Regionalists 1850-1910 in 1992, Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse redefined regionalism as distinct from, and superior to, the late nineteenth-century tradition of local color, a theoretical position solidified in a host of critical essays over the past eleven years....

In addition to perennial topics of interest such as race, modernism, and queer studies, work on fiction from 1900 to the 1930s increasingly extends the designation American into global and transnational contexts, especially in Harlem Renaissance writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Nella Larsen. Other indications of a renewed int...

Long considered to be a work celebrating traditional pioneer values, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has in recent years come under increasing attack for its stereotypic racial representations and attitudes. In one notable instance, novelist Michael Dorris describes trying to read the nov...

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Manitoba, 1982. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Kansas, English, 1990. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 409-424).