Donna M. Campbell

Biography

Donna Campbell (Ph. D., University of Kansas, 1990) teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American
literature. 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, Legacy, Great Plains Quarterly, and the Norton Critical edition of McTeague. Currently chair of the Regional Chapters Committee of the American Studies Association, she has served as an officer in a number of scholarly societies and maintains several web sites. She writes the annual “Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s” chapter for American Literary Scholarship (Duke University Press).

Recent Publications

"Howells's Untrustworthy Realist: Mary Wilkins Freeman." American Literary Realism 38.2 (Winter 2006): 115-132.

"Taking Tips and Losing Class: Challenging the Service Economy in James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce." The Novel and the American Left: Critical Essays on Depression-Era Fiction. Ed. Janet Casey. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. 1-15.

"The 'bitter taste' of Naturalism: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and David Graham Phillips's Susan Lenox." Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism. Ed. Mary Papke. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. 237-259.

"'Written with a hard and ruthless purpose': Rose Wilder Lane, Edna Ferber, and Middlebrow Regional Fiction." Middlebrow Modern: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s. Ed. Meredith Goldsmith and Lisa Botshon. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. 25-44.

“Realism and Regionalism.” A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America. Ed. Charles Crow. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 92-110.

"'The (American) Muse's Tragedy': Edith Wharton, Henry James, and The Little Lady of the Big House." Jack London: One Hundred Years a Writer. Ed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman and Sara S. Hodson. San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 2002. 189-212.

Research Interests

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. Current and past work includes work on the following authors: Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, Louisa May Alcott, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Harold Frederic, Jack London, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Rose Wilder Lane. Her current project is a book on women writers of naturalism.

Links

http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/index.html