Jeff Koloze’s article, “Challenging Feminist Literary Criticism’s Misreading of Specific American Novels From the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” was published in Humanities and Social Science Review 5:2 .
This paper responds to specific questions raised in the author’s previous research on five American novels from the first half of the twentieth century which concern sexuality, abortion, and male-female relationships: Pearl Doles Bell’s Gloria Gray, Love Pirate (1914); Floyd Dell’s Janet March (1923); Viña Delmar’s Bad Girl (1928); Christopher Morley’s Kitty Foyle (1939); and Nancy Hale’s The Prodigal Women (1942). The paper concludes that interpretations of the characters’ religious, moral, and sexual lives from a standard feminist perspective are insufficient to account for the works’ larger didactic purposes. Moreover, the paper asserts that an application of the more comprehensive JudeoChristian approach to sexuality and related topics would assist twenty-first century readers to appreciate the works.