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

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.

Author: Jessica Rabin
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 09/26/2004
Pages: 246
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.01lbs
Size: 9.32h x 6.06w x 0.79d
ISBN: 9780415971188

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.