Kitchen Economics: Women's Regionalist Fiction and Political Economy

An analysis of how nineteenth-century women regional writers represent political economic thought

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Readers of late nineteenth-century female American authors are familiar with plots, characters, and households that make a virtue of economizing. Scholars often interpret these scenarios in terms of a mythos of parsimony, frequently accompanied by a sort of elegiac republicanism whereby self-sufficiency and autonomy are put to the serv...