Details

ISBN-10: 1555535534
ISBN-13: 9781555535537
Publisher: Northeastern University Press
Publish Date: 04/17/2003
Dimensions: 7.86" L, 6.40" W, 1.23" H

The Power and the Glory

Other: Elizabeth S D Engelhardt

Paperback

Price: $9.95

Overview

Originally published in 1910, The Power and the Glory is a fascinating novel set in turn-of-the-century Appalachia. The page-turner centers on spirited heroine Johnnie Consadine and anticipates many contemporary feminist issues. Embarrassed by her family’s reputation for borrowing rather than working, Johnnie leaves her home deep in Appalachia’s Unaka Mountains to take a job at a textile mill in Cottonville, Tennessee, a Chattanooga suburb. Here she challenges the unhealthy, dangerous, and brutal conditions faced by women and children laborers, exposes corporate environmental poisoning, stands up to the hypocritical middle-class ladies of the Uplift Club, invents and patents an idea for improving industrial machinery, and proposes a settlement house, utopian mine, and mill village to help women like herself. A rollicking good read, The Power and the Glory is filled with plot twists and turns that include romance, a lost silver mine, kidnapping, shoot-outs, scheming villains, a wandering chiropractor, and a dramatic automobile chase. The novel’s themes of ecological feminism, social activism, gender roles, and class distinctions remain strikingly relevant for modern readers, who w

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Reviews
"The novel is more than just a good read, as Elizabeth Englehardt explains in her excellent introduction. Rather, well-drawn characters help to avoid some of the stereotyping of Appalachians prevalent in most of the literature of Cooke's day. In addition, the novel is a historically significant text: although Cooke's novels have long been out of print and few scholars have examined her writing, in her lifetime she was both popular and critically acclaimed, and her writing covers nearly fifty years in American literary history. Furthermore, this novel both anticipates many current feminist issues and gives us a chance to see how personal feminism can shape a writer's work. Finally, the novel deserves our attention because it examines industrialization and changing roles in Appalachian society at the turn of the century. The Power and the Glory is an important publishing event for scholars of Appalachian fiction. It should serve as an exemplum of early twentieth-century novels that examine the effect industrialization had on communities, individuals, and, in the this case, on women and children."–Journal of Appalachian Studies
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Details

ISBN-10: 1555535534
ISBN-13: 9781555535537
Publisher: Northeastern University Press
Publish Date: 04/17/2003
Dimensions: 7.86" L, 6.40" W, 1.23" H
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