Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America

Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America PDF Author: William J. Scheick
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813185130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Should women concern themselves with reading other than the Bible? Should women attempt to write at all? Did these activities violate the hierarchy of the universe and men's and women's places in it? Colonial American women relied on the same authorities and traditions as did colonial men, but they encountered special difficulties validating themselves in writing. William Scheick explores logonomic conflict in the works of northeastern colonial women, whose writings often register anxiety not typical of their male contemporaries. This study features the poetry of Mary English and Anne Bradstreet, the letter-journals of Esther Edwards Burr and Sarah Prince, the autobiographical prose of Elizabeth Hanson and Elizabeth Ashbridge, and the political verse of Phyllis Wheatley. These works, along with the writings of other colonial women, provide especially noteworthy instances of bifurcations emanating from American colonial women's conflicted confiscation of male authority. Scheick reveals subtle authorial uneasiness and subtextual tensions caused by the attempt to draw legitimacy from male authorities and traditions.

Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America

Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America PDF Author: William J. Scheick
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813185130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Should women concern themselves with reading other than the Bible? Should women attempt to write at all? Did these activities violate the hierarchy of the universe and men's and women's places in it? Colonial American women relied on the same authorities and traditions as did colonial men, but they encountered special difficulties validating themselves in writing. William Scheick explores logonomic conflict in the works of northeastern colonial women, whose writings often register anxiety not typical of their male contemporaries. This study features the poetry of Mary English and Anne Bradstreet, the letter-journals of Esther Edwards Burr and Sarah Prince, the autobiographical prose of Elizabeth Hanson and Elizabeth Ashbridge, and the political verse of Phyllis Wheatley. These works, along with the writings of other colonial women, provide especially noteworthy instances of bifurcations emanating from American colonial women's conflicted confiscation of male authority. Scheick reveals subtle authorial uneasiness and subtextual tensions caused by the attempt to draw legitimacy from male authorities and traditions.

The Women of Colonial Latin America

The Women of Colonial Latin America PDF Author: Susan Migden Socolow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521196655
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
A highly readable survey of women's experiences in Latin America from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America

Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America PDF Author: Angela Vietto
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351872419
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Exploring the wealth of writings by early American women in a broad spectrum of genres, Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America presents one of the few synthetic approaches to early US women’s writing. Through an examination of the strategic choices writers made as they constructed their authorial identities at a moment when ideals of both Author and Woman were in flux, Angela Vietto argues that the relationship between gender and authorship was dynamic: women writers drew on available conceptions of womanhood to legitimize their activities as writers, and, often simultaneously, drew on various conceptions of authorship to authorize discursive constructions of gender. Focusing on the half-century surrounding the Revolution, this study ranges widely over both well-known and more obscure writers, including Mercy Otis Warren, Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Wentworth Morton, Hannah Griffitts, Annis Boudinot Stockton, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Deborah Gannett, and Sarah Pogson Smith. The resulting analysis complicates and challenges a number of critical commonplaces, presenting instead a narrative of American literary history that presents the novel as women’s entrée into authorship; dichotomized views of civic and commercial authorship and of manuscript and print cultures; and a persistent sense that women of letters constantly struggled against a literary world that begrudged them entrance based on their gender.

First Generations

First Generations PDF Author: Carol Berkin
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466806117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Indian, European, and African women of seventeenth and eighteenth-century America were defenders of their native land, pioneers on the frontier, willing immigrants, and courageous slaves. They were also - as traditional scholarship tends to omit - as important as men in shaping American culture and history. This remarkable work is a gripping portrait that gives early-American women their proper place in history.

Within Her Power

Within Her Power PDF Author: Linda Sturtz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135301964
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This is an engaging and comprehensive study of property-owning women in the colony of Tidewater, VA during the 17th & 18th centuries. It examines the social restrictions on women's behaviour and speech, opportunities and difficulties these women encountered in the legal system, the economic and discretionary authority they enjoyed, the roles they played in the family business,their roles in the later, trans-Atlantic trading framework, and the imperial context within which these colonial women lived, making this a welcome addition to both colonial and women's history.

Women in Early America

Women in Early America PDF Author: Thomas A Foster
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479812196
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Tells the fascinating stories of the myriad women who shaped the early modern North American world from the colonial era through the first years of the Republic Women in Early America, edited by Thomas A. Foster, goes beyond the familiar stories of Pocahontas or Abigail Adams, recovering the lives and experiences of lesser-known women—both ordinary and elite, enslaved and free, Indigenous and immigrant—who lived and worked in not only British mainland America, but also New Spain, New France, New Netherlands, and the West Indies. In these essays we learn about the conditions that women faced during the Salem witchcraft panic and the Spanish Inquisition in New Mexico; as indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland; caught up between warring British and Native Americans; as traders in New Netherlands and Detroit; as slave owners in Jamaica; as Loyalist women during the American Revolution; enslaved in the President’s house; and as students and educators inspired by the air of equality in the young nation. Foster showcases the latest research of junior and senior historians, drawing from recent scholarship informed by women’s and gender history—feminist theory, gender theory, new cultural history, social history, and literary criticism. Collectively, these essays address the need for scholarship on women’s lives and experiences. Women in Early America heeds the call of feminist scholars to not merely reproduce male-centered narratives, “add women, and stir,” but to rethink master narratives themselves so that we may better understand how women and men created and developed our historical past.

Rape and Sexual Power in Early America

Rape and Sexual Power in Early America PDF Author: Sharon Block
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807838934
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
In a comprehensive examination of rape and its prosecution in British America between 1700 and 1820, Sharon Block exposes the dynamics of sexual power on which colonial and early republican Anglo-American society was based. Block analyzes the legal, social, and cultural implications of more than nine hundred documented incidents of sexual coercion and hundreds more extralegal commentaries found in almanacs, newspapers, broadsides, and other print and manuscript sources. Highlighting the gap between reports of coerced sex and incidents that were publicly classified as rape, Block demonstrates that public definitions of rape were based less on what actually happened than on who was involved. She challenges conventional narratives that claim sexual relations between white women and black men became racially charged only in the late nineteenth century. Her analysis extends racial ties to rape back into the colonial period and beyond the boundaries of the southern slave-labor system. Early Americans' treatment of rape, Block argues, both enacted and helped to sustain the social, racial, gender, and political hierarchies of a New World and a new nation.

A Passionate Usefulness

A Passionate Usefulness PDF Author: Gary D. Schmidt
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813922720
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
In a literary environment dominated by men, the first American to earn a living as a writer and to establish a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic was, miraculously, a woman. Hannah Adams dared to enter--and in some ways was forced to enter--a sphere of literature that had, in eighteenth-century America, been solely a male province. Driven by poverty and necessity, and aided by an extraordinarily adept mind and keen sense of business, Adams authored works on New England history, sectarian history, and Jewish history, using and citing the most recent scholarly works being published in Great Britain and America. As a female writer, she would always remain something of an outsider, but her accomplishments did not by any means go unrecognized: embraced by the Boston intelligentsia and highly regarded throughout New England, Adams came to epitomize the possibility in a democratic society that anyone could rise to a circle of intellectual elites. In A Passionate Usefulness, the first book-length biography of this remarkable figure, Gary Schmidt focuses primarily on the intimate connection between Adams's reading and her own literary work. Hers is the story of incipient scholarship in the new nation, the story of a dependence that evolved into intellectual independence. Schmidt sets Adams's works in the context of her early poverty and desperate family situation, her decade-long feud with one of New England's most powerful Calvinist ministers, her alliance with the budding Unitarian movement in Boston, and her work establishing the first evangelical mission to Palestine (a task she accomplished virtually single-handedly). Today Adams still holds a place not only as a female writer who made her way economically in the book business before any other woman--or male writer--could do so, but also as a key figure in the transitional generation between the American Revolution and the Renaissance upon whose groundwork much of the country's later literature would build.

Risk Culture

Risk Culture PDF Author: Joseph Fichtelberg
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472026887
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
"As a number of recent studies have shown, the north European commercial world made the precise calculation of risk a central concern of the intellectual project of exploration, trade, and colonization. The great merit of Fichtelberg's book is systematizing the imaged world of dangers, and charting the various kinds of ritual and discursive performances marshaled to deal with the pressure of the unspeakable in early America from the 17th into the early 19th century. The readings of texts are invariably careful, and the points made, persuasive." ---David Shields, University of South Carolina Risk Culture is the first scholarly book to explore how strategies of performance shaped American responses to modernity. By examining a variety of early American authors and cultural figures, from John Smith and the Salem witches to Phillis Wheatley, Susanna Rowson, and Aaron Burr, Joseph Fichtelberg shows how early Americans created and resisted a dangerously liberating new world. The texts surveyed confront change through a variety of performances designed both to imagine and deter menaces ranging from Smith's hostile Indians, to Wheatley's experience of slavery, to Rowson's fear of exposure in the public sphere. Fichtelberg combines a variety of scholarly approaches, including anthropology, history, cultural studies, and literary criticism, to offer a unique synthesis of literary close reading and sociological theory in the service of cultural analysis. Joseph Fichtelberg is Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Hofstra University.

The Haunted Muse

The Haunted Muse PDF Author: Richard M. Magee
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443892807
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
The Salem witch trials, and the many narratives based on them, both contemporaneous and subsequent discussions, have had a powerful influence on the American national psyche, informing the nation’s political debates and propelling its fears. Perhaps one of the major reasons for the importance of the trials is how they conceive of and present a narrative of danger. The horror grows in and seems to threaten not just the body politic, but, perhaps more importantly, the domestic sanctuary. The home and hearth become a contested ground where good and evil fight for the souls of the inhabitants, or an infection that threatens to spread to other homes and, eventually, the entire community. The fear of witchcraft or demonic possession reveals not just a religious mania, but also a level of misogyny. Much has been made of the connections between witchcraft accusations and midwifery, homeopathy, and other, usually female, pursuits. The link between midwifery and witchcraft is especially interesting here, however, as it suggests an anxiety linked to notions of creation and procreation. This book proposes a link between the fears of usurped procreation elicited by the trials and fears of misdirected or usurped creativity. In many Gothic stories, the authors imagine their literary creations as children who have been transformed by malignant forces, much as the Puritans of 1692 feared that the devil was transforming their actual children. The home in the Gothic story becomes a warped version of the sacred domestic space of sentimental literature, and it transforms from refuge to place of terror. The authors examined here include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Rose Terry Cooke, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Ira Levin.