Adopting a psychoanalytic approach, Joseph Church's Transcendent Daughters proposes that the narrator's venture among these people in fact allegorizes an anxious daughter's return to familial origins and dramatizes her reengagement with and effort to transcend unconscious constituents of the self established during early maturation, specifically androgynous composites of an internalized hostile mother and idealized father that now severely constrict her world, most of all, her access to beneficent women.

A sharply observed, affectionate, and unsentimental portrait of life in a Maine fishing village, The Country of the Pointed Firs is Sarah Orne Jewett’s most enduring work, and commonly regarded as the finest example of American regionalist literature in the nineteenth century. It was originally published in four installments of the Atlantic Monthly in 1896; this Broadview Edition is based on the Atlantic serialization and also includes the four other stories set in Dunnet Landing. The critical introduction situates the text in its historical, cultural, and literary milieu, attending to its place in Jewett’s oeuvre and in her biography. Appendices include earlier “local color” writing by Jewett and others, Jewett’s letters, and contemporary reviews of the novel.

A Study Guide for Sarah Orne Jewett's "The Country of the Pointed Firs," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

Praise for the print edition:" ... no other reference work on American fiction brings together such an array of authors and texts as this.

Reference Guide to Short Fiction provides study and commentary on the most instrumental writers of short fiction through the 20th century. International in scope, this single scholarly volume includes 779 entries on 377 authors and 402 short stories.