A Marsh Island / / Sarah Orne Jewett; ed. by Don James McLaughlin.
Toward the end of her life, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) made a surprising disclosure. Instead of the critically lauded The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett declared her “best story” to be A Marsh Island (1885), a little-known novel. Why? One reason is that it demonstrates Jewett’s range. Known...
Saved in:
Superior document: | Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English |
---|---|
VerfasserIn: | |
HerausgeberIn: | |
Place / Publishing House: | Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2023] ©2023 |
Year of Publication: | 2023 |
Language: | English |
Series: | Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century
|
Online Access: | |
Physical Description: | 1 online resource (216 p.) :; 8 halftones |
Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
Other title: | Frontmatter -- Contents -- Editor’s Note -- Introduction • The Unbounded Terrain of Companionship in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “Best Story” -- A Marsh Island -- Notes -- Acknowledgments |
---|---|
Summary: | Toward the end of her life, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) made a surprising disclosure. Instead of the critically lauded The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett declared her “best story” to be A Marsh Island (1885), a little-known novel. Why? One reason is that it demonstrates Jewett’s range. Known primarily for her vignettes, Jewett accomplished in these pages a truly great novel. Undoubtedly, another reason lies in the novel’s themes of queer kinship and same-sex domesticity, as enjoyed by the flamboyant protagonist Dick Dale. Written a few years into Jewett’s decades-long companionship with Annie Fields, A Marsh Island echoes Jewett’s determination to split time between her family home in Maine and Fields’s place on Charles Street in Boston. The novel follows the adventures of Dale, a Manhattanite landscape painter in the Great Marsh of northeastern Massachusetts and envisions the latter region’s saltmarsh as a figure for dynamic selfhood: the ever-shifting boundaries between land and sea a model for valuing both individuality and a porous openness to the gifts of others.Jewett’s works played a major role in popularizing the genre of American regionalism and has garnered praise, both in her time and ours, for her skill in rendering the local landscapes and fishing villages along or near the coasts of New England. Just as Jewett brought attention to the unique beauty and value of the Great marsh region, editor Don James McLaughlin reveals a convergence of regionalism and sexuality in Jewett’s work in his introduction. A Marsh Island reminds us that queer kinship has a long tradition of being extended to incorporate queer ecological belonging, and that the meaning of “companionship” itself is enriched when we acknowledge its indebtedness to environment. |
Format: | Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web. |
ISBN: | 9781512824278 9783111319292 9783111318912 9783111319186 9783111318264 9783110791372 |
DOI: | 10.9783/9781512824278?locatt=mode:legacy |
Access: | restricted access |
Hierarchical level: | Monograph |
Statement of Responsibility: | Sarah Orne Jewett; ed. by Don James McLaughlin. |