Village Rebels

Stephanie Palmer is a senior lecturer of English at Nottingham Trent University. She is the author of Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers and Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class and a coeditor of New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading with and against the Grain.

"Fresh and enlightening. . . . Stephanie Palmer's study ranges from the 'restless women' texts by Neith Boyce, Zona Gale, and Mary Austin to male outsider characters from Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman, illuminating the ways in which these texts anticipate contemporary theories of environmentalism, community, and childrearing. Their work communicates that improvement, not flight, was the answer to the problem of the village. Village Rebels is an essential resource for scholars of regionalism and early twentieth-century literature, both challenging and expanding Carl Van Doren's concept of the conformity of the American small town."--Donna M. Campbell, author of Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915 "Stephanie Palmer's new book is both a major revision of our view of the 'revolt from the village' literature of the early twentieth century and a model of literary history. Taking an ecocritical and ecofeminist approach, drawing on extensive archival research, Palmer shows that far from being limned by a handful of white men like Sinclair Lewis, small town life was being portrayed by members of a broad literary ecosystem composed of women and men, Black and white. Their work grappled with issues that were playing out locally and remain consequential, including the character and composition of community. Highly recommended for all Americanists."--Sandra A. Zagarell, president of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, 2018-2021 "One of the strengths of Village Rebels is bringing the work of a range of authors together and treating better-known and lesser-known works equally. This approach provides a much fuller sense of the literature of 'revolt' than has been previously acknowledged. The result is a study that offers a range of insightful readings as well as new and important perspectives on a period and movement in American literature that is currently underexplored."--Rita Bode, coeditor of L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s)