Pride and Protest: The Novel in Indiana (Distributed for the Indiana Historical Society) - Tapa dura

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This path breaking book places Indiana's rich tradition of fiction writing into the broad context of American literature. It explores the contributions that Indiana novelists - writers such as Edward Eggleston, Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser, and Gene Stratton-Porter - have made to mainstream American fiction and to the major movements in American writing. Though it looks only at novels that deal with Indiana, Vanausdall's study shows how these works reflect not only regional but also larger, national concerns. Vanausdall begins with early Indiana fiction and its treatment of the frontier experience.Many early Indiana novels, she notes, are thinly-veiled accounts of the immense social, physical, and personal challenges of frontier life. The novels of Baynard Rush Hall, Eunice Beecher, Mary Hartwell Catherwood, and Edward Eggleston reflect a distinct Midwestern realism that exposed the harsh conditions on the frontier as well as the tension between transplanted Easterners and poor rural folk. Her treatment of the 'Golden Age' of Indiana writing (1870-1920) places many of the most popular and influential works of this period firmly in the tradition of the American romance.In fact, Indiana novelists such as Maurice Thompson, Lew Wallace, George Barr McCutcheon, Charles Major, and Meredith Nicholson actively shaped this tradition. In a similar way, Indiana novelists such as Booth Tarkington and Theodore Dreiser made important contributions when a new generation of writers led by William Dean Howells called for a realistic portrayals of everyday life. Vanausdall also treats the 'farm fiction' of the 1920s and 30s, best represented by the works of Leroy Oliver MacLeod and Gene Stratton-Porter; the postwar attempt to restore the American Eden and the search for the Great American Novel, exemplified by Ross Lockridge, Jr.; and finally the sense of place in contemporary literature, where the regionalism of Indiana is best seen as a reflection of the inescapable power of place in all great literature.