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 romance fiction, exemplified by the works of Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Faulkner, and Ellison, is skeptical and antipatriarchal, and that women writers have built on the tradition to accommodate the exigencies of modern American society.