Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction

   • Jeannette King

   Pages 1-27

3. Revisiting the Canon, Rewriting History: Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife, Or The Stargazer

   • Jeannette King

   Pages 29-41

4. Domesticating the Wilderness, a Woman’s Mission: Jane Smiley, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

   • Jeannette King

   Pages 43-55

5. Women and an Uncivil War: Paulette Jiles, Enemy Women

   • Jeannette King

   Pages 57-65

6. Adventures of Body and Soul: Audrey Thomas, Isobel Gunn

   • Jeannette King

   Pages 67-78

7. Home and Away: Jane Urquhart, Away: A Novel

   • Jeannette King

   Pages 79-90

8. The Female Epic: Antonine Maillet, Pélagie: The Return to Acadie

   • Jeannette King

   Pages 91-106

9. Conquistador’s Moll or Mother of the Nation? Laura Esquivel, Malinche

   • Jeannette King

   Pages 107-119

10. The Female Conquistador: Isabel Allende, Inés of My Soul

    • Jeannette King

    Pages 121-132

11. The Legacy of the Conquistadors: Esmeralda Santiago, Conquistadora

    • Jeannette King

    Pages 133-146

12. Conclusion

    • Jeannette King

    Pages 147-150

13. Back Matter

    Pages 151-164

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This book brings together for the first time nine groundbreaking historical novels by women from the United States, Canada and Latin America, united by their focus on female adventurers. These novels introduce the neglected women of history, real and imagined, who accompanied their menfolk to the New World, and enabled its settlement or colonisation. Familiar novelists include Isabel Allende, Audrey Thomas and Jane Smiley, but this book also introduces less familiar writers who have produced richly textured and densely historical novels. In addition to putting women back into history, these writers engage with the literature of the past, including the American canon of male fiction which dominated literary history before the intervention of feminist scholars. The book begins with an introduction to the history of historical fiction and provides a theoretical, historical and geographical context for the novels themselves.

• Literature, Gender and Sexuality
• Literature and Postcolonial Studies
• historical fiction
• contemporary women’s writing
• Canadian fiction
• US fiction
• New World
• male role models
• feminist history

“King’s book is impressive in its gender analysis of these representations of valorous women. Adventurous Women expands both traditional ideas of adventure stories and the history of women’s role in the exploration of the wilderness and the building of the nation. In addressing both historical events and literary fictions, it provides a route into examining indigenous matriarchal culture alongside Eurocentric patriarchal tradition, tracing a canon of women adventurers whose exploits shatter the more familiar myths of adventuring heroes.” (Xiuchun Zhang, Contemporary Women's Writing, May 3, 2023)​

• School of Language, Literature, Music & Visual Culture, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

  Jeannette King

Jeannette King is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Publications include: Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: (2012), The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (2005), Women and the Word: Contemporary Women Novelists and the Bible (2000), and Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James (1978).

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