Nineteenth-Century Southern Women Writers

The essays in this book explore the role of Grace Kings fiction in the movement of American literature from local color and realism to modernism and show that her work exposes a postbellum New Orleans that is fragmented socially, politically, and linguistically. In her introduction, Melissa Walker Heidari examines selections from Kings journals and letters as views into her journey toward a modernist aestheticwhat King describes in one passage as "the continual voyage I made." Sirpa Salenius sees Kings fiction as a challenge to dominant conceptualizations of womanhood and a reaction against female oppression and heteronormativity. In his analysis of "An Affair of the Heart," Ralph J. Poole highlights the rhetoric of excess that reveals a social satire debunking sexual and racial double standards. Ineke Bockting shows the modernist aspects of Kings fiction through a stylistic analysis which explores spatial, temporal, biological, psychological, social, and racial liminalities. Franoise Buisson demonstrates that Kings writing "is inspired by the Southern oral tradition but goes beyond it by taking on a theatrical dimension that can be quite modern and even experimental at times." Kathie Birat claims that it is important to underline Kings relationship to realism, "for the metonymic functioning of space as a signifier for social relations is an important characteristic of the realist novel." Stphanie Durrans analyzes "The Story of a Day" as an incest narrative and focuses on Kings development of a modernist aesthetics to serve her terrifying investigation into social ills as she probes the inner world of her silent character. Amy Doherty Mohr explores intersections between regionalism and modernism in public and silenced histories, as well as Kings treatment of myth and mobility. Brigitte Zaugg examines in "The Little Convent Girl" Kings presentation of the figure of the double and the issue of language as well as the narrative voice, which, she argues, "definitely inscribes the text, with its understatement, economy and quiet symbolism, in the modernist tradition." Miki Pfeffer closes the collection with an afterword in which she offers excerpts from Kings letters as encouragement for "scholars to seek Grace King as a primary source," arguing that "Grace Kings own words seem best able to dialogue with the critical readings herein." Each of these essays enables us to see Kings place in the construction of modernity; each illuminates the "continual voyage" that King made.