Caroline Kirkland Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Caroline Gebhard

Critical Essay by Caroline Gebhard

SOURCE: “Caroline M. Kirkland's Satire of Frontier Democracy in A New Home—Who'll Follow?” in Women, America, and Movement: Narratives of Relocation, edited by Susan L. Roberson, University of Missouri Press, 1998, pp. 157-75.

In the following essay, Gebhard discusses Kirkland's use of humor and the manner in which it “relates both to the author's own life and to the book's ‘realism' of social type.”

In her groundbreaking work on diaries of frontier women, Lillian Schlissel argued for the need to read “the obscured patterns” in such women's writing, yet ironically only recently have critics begun to value the complex literary form of Caroline M. Kirkland's work about settling the West. Most have been content to label her a “pioneer realist” (Langley C. Keyes was the first to recognize her as a “pioneer in American Realism,” but Kirkland's importance as an early contributor to this major American development in literature was...
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