Engendering Romance: Women Writers and the Hawthorne Tradition, 1850-1990

This engrossing book describes how four twentieth-century women writers—Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, and Grace Paley—have inherited and adapted the classical tradition of American romance fiction.

Emily Miller Budick argues that this tradition, exemplified by the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, is inherently skepticist, questioning whether and how we know reality. It is also sharply criti...