Travelling Regionalism and the Art of Comparison

Stephanie Palmer holds a PhD in English from the University of Michigan and is presently a Senior Lecturer in nineteenth-century American literature at Nottingham Trent University. Her research recovers and scrutinizes women’s writing in the context of place, social class, and national and transnational cultures. Her monograph Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class (Lexington Books, 2009) traces a motif of ‹regional travel accident› through texts by Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte, Rebecca Harding Davis, Thomas Detter, William Dean Howells, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps to show how writers scripted their contradictory relation to provincial places. Palmer’s second monograph, Transatlantic Footholds: Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers and British Reviewers, is the first major study of British reviews of American women’s fiction, essays, and poetry between the periods of literary domesticity and modernism. Her current work examines new voices in the revolt from the village movement of the 1910s and 1920s, showing how the movement was led by white women and supported by African American men and women.