RSS 1.0Campbell, Donna
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Contact information:
campbelld@wsu.edu or 509-335-4831
Overview
This collection features research by Donna Campbell, professor of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature in the English department at Washington State University. Campbell earned her Ph. D. at the University of Kansas in 1990. Before coming to WSU in 2004, she was an associate professor of English at Gonzaga University, where she won the university’s Outstanding Scholarship award in 2000. Her book Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1880-1915 (Ohio U P, 1997), won the Northeast Modern Language Association book prize in 1995, and her publications, several of which have been reprinted, include articles in Studies in American Fiction, American Literary Realism, Studies in American Naturalism, Legacy, Resources for American Literary Study, Great Plains Quarterly, and the Norton Critical Edition of McTeague. Chair of the Regional Chapters Committee of the American Studies Association from 2004-2008, she has served as an officer in a number of scholarly societies, including the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, and maintains several web sites. From 2000-2008 she wrote the annual “Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s” chapter for American Literary Scholarship (Duke University Press). From 2007-2010 she was the Lewis and Stella Buchanan Distinguished Associate Professor of English, and from September 2010-June 2011 she served as the editor of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance.
Professor Campbell’s research interests include American literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a special interest in local color or regional fiction, realism, and naturalism. Her other interests include the field of digital humanities, early film, and women’s middlebrow fiction of the 1920s (Edna Ferber, Rose Wilder Lane, Dorothy Canfield Fisher). Her publications include work on Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, Louisa May Alcott, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Harold Frederic, Jack London, and Sarah Orne Jewett.
Recent Submissions
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"Have you read my 'Christ' story?": Mary Austin's The Man Jesus and London's The Star Rover
(The Call, 2012)This article considers Christ stories written by authors Mary Austin and Jack London at the beginning of the twentieth century. That Austin, a mystic who believed she was in touch with Indian spirits, and London, an avowed ... -
The Next 150 Years: Wharton Goes Digital
(2012)In thinking about the digital future of Wharton studies, I want to turn backward to ltalian Backgrounds (L905), a series of travel essays, mostly previously published, that came out six months before The House of Mirth ( ... -
W. D. Howells's Unpublished Letters to J. Harvey Greene
(Resources for American Literary Study, 2011)The relationship between W. D. Howells (1H37-1920) and his boyhood friend .James Harvey (or Hervey) Greene (1833-90) is treated only briefly in biographies of Howells, an understandable situation given the extensive network ... -
Edith Wharton's "Book of the Grotesque": Sherwood Anderson, Modernism, and the Late Stories
(Edith Wharton Review, 2010)This article discusses Edith Wharton's "The Looking Glass" and "The Day of the Funeral." -
Book review: Anita Clair Fellman; Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture
(Tulsa Studies in Women�۪s Literature, 2009)Here Donna Campbell reviews the book: Fellman, Anita Clair. Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Impact on American Culture. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. -
A Forgotten Daughter of Bohemia: Gertrude Christian Fosdick's Out of Bohemia and the Artists' Novel of the 1890s
(University of Nebraska Press, 2008)This article provides a biographical sketch of Gertrude Christian Fosdick and analyzes her little-known novel of a female artist in the context of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Hawthorne's The Marble Faun. -
A Literary Expatriate: Hamlin Garland, Edith Wharton, and the Politics of a Literary Reputation
(Edith Wharton Review, 2008)This article discusses Hamlin Garland's relationship with Edith Wharton and his three published recollections of their meeting as indices of her critical standing. -
Walden in the Suburbs: Thoreau, Rock Hudson, and Natural Style in Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows
(Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008)In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel of the 1950s, her heroine Esther Greenwood announces at one point "I hate Technicolor" (41) because of its "lurid costumes" and the way in which characters tend "to ... -
More than a Family Resemblance? Agnes Crane's A Victorious Defeat and Stephen Crane's The Third Violet
(Stephen Crane Studies, 2007)Like his younger contemporary Jack London, who famously claimed to have had "no mentor but myself," Stephen Crane acknowledged few influences on his writing. Established authors such as W. D. Howells and contemporaries ... -
Reflections on Stephen Crane
(Stephen Crane Studies, 2006)Like a lot of people, I was first introduced to Crane in a high school English class, but since the book was The Red Badge of Courage, and hence about war, I paid little attention. I did not care about war or about Henry ... -
Book review: Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper
(Resources for American Literary Study, 2005)Here Donna Campbell provides a review of Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper, a biography by Axel Nissen that considers the significance of Bret Harte, American short story writer (1836-1902). -
Book review: Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life
(Pacific Historical Review, 2004-08)Here Donna Campbell reviews the book: Phillips, Kate. Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. -
"Written with a Hard and Ruthless Purpose": Rose Wilder Lane, Edna Ferber, and Middlebrow Regional Fiction
(Northeastern University Press, 2003)When Walter Benn Michaels proposed in Our America that "the great American modernist texts of the '20s must be understood as deeply committed to the nativist project of racializing the American" (13), his examination left ... -
Book Review: Augusta Rohrbach, "Truth Stranger than Fiction": Race, Realism, and the U.S. Literary Marketplace
(Edith Wharton Review, 2003)Here Donna Campbell reviews the book: Augusta Rohrbach. "Truth Stranger than Fiction": Race, Realism, and the U.S. Literary Marketplace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. -
Realism and Regionalism
(Blackwell, 2003)To see realism and regionalism as the powerful forces they were for their nineteenth-century audiences, then, we need to set aside Mencken's prejudices and look at them from the dual perspective of literary documents of ... -
Book Review: Hildegard Hoeller, Edith Wharton's Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction
(Edith Wharton Review, 2002)Here Donna Campbell reviews: Hoeller, Hildegard. Edith Wharton's Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction. University Press of Florida, 2000. 208 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. ISBN 0-8130-1776-1. -
Jack London's Allegorical Landscapes: "The God of His Fathers," "The Priestly Prerogative"
(Literature and Belief, 2001)Like that of many of his fellow naturalistic writers, Jack London's response to the question of belief throughout his life and career in both complex and paradoxical. Born to a spiritualist mother whose seances were part ... -
"One Spot of Color": Frank Norris's Apprenticeship Writings
(Frank Norris Studies, 1998)This article describes Frank Norris' use of "local color" techniques as he moved ahead in his career as writer of American naturalism. It also explores Norris' relationship to race and the traditional "subjects" of local ... -
Male Call: Becoming Jack London
(Modern Fiction Studies, 1996)Presented here is a review by Donna Campbell analyzing the book: Jonathan Auerbach. Male Call: Becoming Jack London. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. x + 289 pp. -
Edith Wharton and the "Authoresses": The Critique of Local Color in Wharton's Early Fiction
(Studies in American Fiction, 1994)Edith Wharton's impatience with what she called the "rose and lavender pages" of the New England local color "authoresses" reverberates throughout her autobiography and informs such novels as Ethan Frome and Summer. In A ...