"Places of the Heart": Female Regionalist Writers in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature

Abstract

This article is the second in a series of articles which revolve around relationships between women and space. While the previous article concentrates on regionalism in general and its place in the development of U.S. literature (especially in the nineteenth century), in this discussion I focus in greater detail on female writers of regionalist and local color fiction in the last half of the nineteenth century. In so doing, I examine major issues concerning traditional interrelationships of gender, place, and literature, and the ways in which narrative style, strategies, and valuations concern identity, particularly gendered identity.