"McDade's study is an interesting and thought-provoking one, showing how a range of women writers of various ethnicities and across a span of years and genres dealt with dominant literary forms and cultural agendas to subvert these agendas and present, either subtly or directly, a message of greater inclusion."-Margaret Doane, Western American Literature "Monique McDade rightly comments that we have too few scholarly books that discuss western American women's literature as a genre. Her book, California Dreams and American Contradictions: Women Writers and the Western Ideal, is a welcome addition to the field of western literary studies and women's literature."-Cathryn Halverson, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature “California Dreams and American Contradictions shows great intellectual agility in its ability to make complex connections using fluent and highly readable language. It is deeply intersectional. . . . It is a book that any scholar on the topic will want to read from cover to cover, and it opens new ground for future scholarship.”-Victoria Lamont, author of Westerns: A Women’s History “Especially in our current moment of reckoning with the legacies of exclusion and racism in the United States and globally, this study performs essential work of historical recovery and intervention. It makes a substantial contribution to feminist critical regionalism in the U.S. West and to feminist and American studies more broadly. It engages a powerful set of theoretical tools to create a sophisticated argument across disciplines and fields of study.”-Audrey Goodman, author of A Planetary Lens: The Photo-Poetics of Western Women’s Writing
