Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002
Includes bibliographical references and index
The concept of woman as having a distinctive nature and requiring a separate sphere of activity from that of man was pervasive in the thinking of nineteenth- century Americans. So dominant was this ""horizon of expectations"" for woman that the imaginations of our finest novelists were often subverted, even as they attempted to expand the possibilities for women through their fiction
[1.] - Construction - James Fenimore Cooper: the point of departure -- - Nathaniel Hawthorne: a pilgrimage to a dovecote -- - [2.] - Confirmation - William Dean Howells: the male imagination at the crossroads -- - Henry James: the summit of the male imagination -- - [3.] - Deconstruction - Edith Wharton: the female imagination & the territory within
