America the Middlebrow: Women's Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars (review)

Abstract

and John, Mary Johnston’s Hagar, and Zona Gale’s Friendship Village). More attention to the broader print cultural context in which these works appeared would have strengthened petty’s argument about how fictional oppositional communities can do cultural work off the printed page. petty’s study also would have been enriched by a more sustained engagement with the significant body of scholarship addressing activism in fiction by british authors of the same period. of course, the larger project of which Romancing the Vote is a part—recuperating the feminist reform tradition within American literature— is too large for one monograph to cover. petty’s study clears the way for future explorations of this tradition.