Representing Rural Women seeks to highlight the complexity and diversity of representations of rural women in the U.S. and Canada from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The 15 chapters in the collection offer fresh perspectives on representations of rural women in literature, popular culture, and print, digital, and social media. They explore a wide range of time periods, geographic spaces, and rural women's experiences, including Mormon pioneer women, rural lesbians in the 1970s, Canadian rural women's organizations, and rural trans youth. In their stories, these women and girls navigate multiple settings and address the complex realities of rural life, create spaces for self-expression, develop networks to communicate their experiences, and seek to challenge misconceptions and stereotypes of rural womanhood. The chapters in this collection consider the ways that rural geography may allow freedoms as well as impose constraints on women's lives, and ultimately how cultural representations of rural womanhood both reflect and shape women's experiences.
Contents Introduction: Representing Rural Women Margaret Thomas-Evans and Whitney Womack Smith Part I: Representations of Rural Women in Literature and Film Chapter 1. "Gone Country": Literary Depictions of the New Woman in Rurality Adam Nemmers Chapter 2. Reassessing the American Migration Experience: The Dollmaker's Gertie Nevels as an American Working-Class Heroine Laurie Cella Chapter 3. A Quiet, Debilitating Ailment: Racial Isolation and Rural America in Willa Cather's and Zora Neale Hurston's Experimental Fiction Jericho Williams Chapter 4. Ginseng-Gathering Women: The Underground Economy in Five Appalachian Novels Jimmy Dean Smith Chapter 5. The Potential to Reform Rural Fingerbone: Sylvie's New Western Revolution in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping Amanda Zastrow Chapter 6. Rural Spaces and (In)Disposable Bodies in Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones Jim Coby Chapter 7. Codes of Kinship: Rural Poverty and Female Resilience in Winter's Bone H. Louise Davis and Whitney Womack Smith Chapter 8. Rural Trans Girlhoods in Young Adult Fiction Barbara Pini and Wendy Keys Part II: Rural Women's Self-Representations Chapter 9. Poetic Representations of Mormon Women in Late Nineteenth-Century Frontier America Amy Easton-Flake Chapter 10. Lightning Strikes, Burned Bread & Chipmunks: Women Lookouts in the American West Nancy Cook Chapter 11. A Life in the Country: Lesbians and Feminists Living on the Land Agatha Beins and Julie Enszer Chapter 12. On Rural Transgender Visibility Eli Erlick Chapter 13. Visual and Digital Representations of Canadian Rural Women's Organizations Margaret Thomas-Evans Chapter 14. "Pining for High Fashion?": Rural Women Writing on Fashion Online Holly Kent Chapter 15. Fantasies and Phobias: De-Mythologizing Contemporary and Historical Depictions of Rural Women Elizabeth Thompson Index About the Editors About the Contributors
