Criticism
While MacDonald's work was popular with critics at its release, modern reappraisals of the book have been critical of the book's treatment of native Americans. Her treatment of the rural working class "spawned a perception of Washington as a land of eccentric country bumpkins like Ma and Pa Kettle."
Those who defend MacDonald's overall catalog of work counter that these findings are measured against modern cultural standards, and not in the context of American pop culture of the 1940s, when such stereotyping was more widely accepted.
Read more about this topic: The Egg And I
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“Good criticism is very rare and always precious.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)