SOURCE: "Cultural Ambivalence in Constance Fenimore Woolson's Italian Tales," in Tennessee Studies in Literature, edited by Richard Beale Davis and Kenneth L. Knickerbocker, Vol. XII, University of Tennessee Press, 1967, pp. 121-29.

In the following essay, White considers Woolson 's letters and short stories as expressions of American ambivalence toward "the foreign " in general and Italy in particular.

Until recently, Constance Fenimore Woolson, grandniece of Fenimore Cooper and a respected authoress in her own right during the 1870's and '80's, was a figure but dimly remembered by most students of American literature, a figure occupying one of the shadowier niches in the gallery of "local color writers." In the past couple of years, however, her name has been broadcast by two separate scholars. Professor Rayburn Moore has published a book-length study of Miss Woolson which asserts she was a writer of modest but genuine talent who produced, along...