Ellen Glasgow: Insurgent Womanhood in Her Novels

Ellen Glasgow: Insurgent Womanhood in Her Novels

Sub : American Literature and Society”

Title of the Research Paper: “Ellen Glasgow: The Insurgent Womanhood in Her Novels.”

Presented by : Alpesh Upadhyay
(Lecturer in English)
Saraspur Arts & Commerce College,
Ahmedabad.

ELLEN GLASGOW (1874-1945), was a transitional figure in Southern American literature during the early twentieth century. She began her literary career at a time when most Southern fictions were romanticized portraits of the ideals and institutions lost after the Civil war. She rebelled against the unrealistic traditions in her society, was also impelled to rebel against the literature which expressed the South’s social and moral code depicting it as restrictive and false, and satirized her society’s idealization of the past. She brought to the gritting of Southern fiction the tenets of the late-nineteenth-century realism that was rooted in the earlier theorise and practice of Zola, Balzac, Maupassant, Flaubert, and the great English novelists-Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Meredith, and hardy. She was influenced also by Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers.
The result was as corpus of novels that depicted more honestly the of Southern history and experience than had heretofore been the rule in affect. Miss Glasgow introduced into Southern writing the presumptions, preoccupations, and themes of the realities of life and society of her time. Her novels are the realistic presentation and analysis of the conflict between tradition and modernity.
Following her plunge into the works of the French and the English realists. Miss Glasgow derived further inspiration from Chekhov and above all from Tolstoy was the writer whose work suggested her that the excellence of her own fiction might depend on the extent to which she could immerse herself in the milieu that she knew the best. The result was a series of novels dealing with the history, the people, the manners, the customs, and the...

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