Document Type
Review
Department
Media Studies (Pomona)
Publication Date
2-1-1998
Keywords
Georgi-Findlay, Brigitte, Books-Reviews, American history, culture
Abstract
Georgi-Findlay's project in The Frontiers of Women's Writing is in many ways a synthesis of these two revisionary projects, both re-attributing importance to women's narratives of westward expansion and re-reading those narratives for their constructions of the colonialist presence in the west. She examines in these narratives, which span genres including fiction, travel writing, semi-public diaries, and personal letters, across "a range of cultural discourses ordering relations of race, class, and gender" (pp. x-xi) to show how "women's accounts are implicated in expansionist processes at the same time that they formulate positions of innocence and detachment" (p. xi). By mobilizing Mary Louise Pratt's notions of the "contact zone," the "anti-conquest," and "imperial meaning-making," Georgi-Findlay explores the ways in which the narratives of westward expansion reveal the colonialist project in the West precisely by their attempts at erasing the other cultures present in these contested spaces.
Rights Information
© 1998 H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online
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Recommended Citation
Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Review of Georgi-Findlay, Brigitte, The Frontiers of Women's Writing: Women's Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion. H-Women, H-Net Reviews. February, 1998. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1715
Comments
Previously linked to as: http://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/u?/irw,329
This article may also be found at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1715.