After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Overall very good and clean. - A continuation of Josephine Donovan's exploration of American women's literary traditions, begun with New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition, which treats the nineteenthcentury realists, this work analyzes the writing of the major women writers of the early twentieth century � Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow. The author sees the Demeter-Persephone myth as central to these writers' thematics, but interprets the myth in terms of the historical transitions taking place in turn-of-the-century America. Donovan focuses on the changing relationship between mothers and daughters � in particular upon the "new woman's" rebellion against the traditional women's culture of their nineteenth-century mothers (both literary and literal). An introductory chapter traces the malesupremacist ideologies that formed the intellectual climate in which these women wrote. Reorienting Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow within women's cultural transitions and women's literary traditions produces major reinterpretations of their works, including such masterpieces as Ethan Frame, Summer, My Antonia, Barren Ground, and others. - Josephine Donovan's books include Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism; New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition; and Sarah Orne Jewett. She is on the faculty of the University of Maine.