Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing

Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing PDF Author: Dorri Beam
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139489232
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
In this 2010 book, Dorri Beam presents an important contribution to nineteenth-century fiction by examining how and why a florid and sensuous style came to be adopted by so many authors. Discussing a diverse range of authors, including Margaret Fuller and Pauline Hopkins, Beam traces this style through a variety of literary endeavors and reconstructs the political rationale behind the writers' commitments to this form of prose. Beam provides both close readings of a number of familiar and unfamiliar works and an overarching account of the importance of this form of writing, suggesting new ways of looking at style as a medium through which gender can be signified and reshaped. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth Century American Women's Writing redefines our understanding of women's relation to aesthetics and their contribution to both American literary romanticism and feminist reform. This illuminating account provides valuable new insights for scholars of American literature and women's writing.

Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing

Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing PDF Author: Dorri Beam
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139489232
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this 2010 book, Dorri Beam presents an important contribution to nineteenth-century fiction by examining how and why a florid and sensuous style came to be adopted by so many authors. Discussing a diverse range of authors, including Margaret Fuller and Pauline Hopkins, Beam traces this style through a variety of literary endeavors and reconstructs the political rationale behind the writers' commitments to this form of prose. Beam provides both close readings of a number of familiar and unfamiliar works and an overarching account of the importance of this form of writing, suggesting new ways of looking at style as a medium through which gender can be signified and reshaped. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth Century American Women's Writing redefines our understanding of women's relation to aesthetics and their contribution to both American literary romanticism and feminist reform. This illuminating account provides valuable new insights for scholars of American literature and women's writing.

Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels

Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels PDF Author: Dale M. Bauer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108486541
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Recovers the careers of four US women serial writers, and establishes a new archive for American literary studies.

Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature

Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature PDF Author: David Greven
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317130111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Expanding our understanding of the possibilities and challenges inherent in the expression of same-sex desire before the Civil War, David Greven identifies a pattern of what he calls ’gender protest’ and sexual possibility recurring in antebellum works. He suggests that major authors such as Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne consciously sought to represent same-sex desire in their writings. Focusing especially on conceptions of the melancholia of gender identification and shame, Greven argues that same-sex desire was inextricably enmeshed in scenes of gender-role strain, as exemplified in the extent to which The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym depicts masculine identity adrift and in disarray. Greven finds similarly compelling representations of gender protest in Fuller’s exploration of the crisis of gendered identity in Summer on the Lakes, in Melville’s representation of Redburn’s experience of gender nonconformity, and in Hawthorne’s complicated delineation of desire in The Scarlet Letter. As Greven shows, antebellum authors not only took up the taboo subjects of same-sex desire and female sexuality, but were adept in their use of a variety of rhetorical means for expressing the inexpressible.

Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism

Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism PDF Author: Jana L. Argersinger
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820343390
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
The first large-scale, collaborative study of women's voices and their vital role in the American transcendentalist movement. Many of its seventeen distinguished scholars work from newly recovered archives, and all offer fresh readings of understudied topics and texts, shedding light on female contributions.

Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1900

Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1900 PDF Author: Elizabeth Renker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019253629X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
The terms 'poetry' and 'realism' have a complex and often oppositional relationship in American literary histories of the postbellum period. The core narrative holds that 'realism', the major literary 'movement' of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-Romantic mode, languished and stagnated. Poetry is almost entirely absent from scholarship on American literary realism except as the emblem of realism's opposite: a desiccated genteel 'twilight of the poets.' Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866-1900 refutes the familiar narrative of postbellum poetics as a scene of failure, and it recovers the active and variegated practices of a diverse array of realist poets across print culture. The triumph of the twilight tale in the twentieth century obscured, minimized, and flattened the many poetic discourses of the age, including but not limited to a significant body of realist poems currently missing from US literary histories. Excavating an extensive archive of realist poems, the volume offers a significant revision to the genre-exclusive story of realism and, by extension, to the very foundations of postbellum American literary history dating back to the earliest stages of the discipline.

The Cambridge History of American Poetry

The Cambridge History of American Poetry PDF Author: Alfred Bendixen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316123308
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1442

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Book Description
The Cambridge History of American Poetry offers a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their beginnings until the end of the twentieth century. Bringing together the insights of fifty distinguished scholars, this literary history emphasizes the complex roles that poetry has played in American cultural and intellectual life, detailing the variety of ways in which both public and private forms of poetry have met the needs of different communities at different times. The Cambridge History of American Poetry recognizes the existence of multiple traditions and a dramatically fluid canon, providing current perspectives on both major authors and a number of representative figures whose work embodies the diversity of America's democratic traditions.

Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America PDF Author: Stacey Margolis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316381366
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America examines how mass democracy was understood before public opinion could be measured by polls. It argues that fiction, in its freedom to represent what resists representation, develops the most groundbreaking theories of the democratic public. These literary accounts of democracy focus less on overt pubic action than the profound effects of everyday social encounters. This book thus departs from recent scholarship, which emphasizes the responsibilities of citizenship and the achievements of oppositional social movements. It demonstrates how novels and stories by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs and James Fenimore Cooper attempt to understand a public organized not only by explicitly political discourse, but by informal and disorganized social networks.

Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos

Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos PDF Author: Owen Clayton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009348078
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
The most enduring version of the hobo that has come down from the so-called 'Golden Age of Tramping' (1890s to 1940s) is an American cultural icon, signifying freedom from restraint and rebellion to the established order while reinforcing conservative messages about American exceptionalism, individualism, race, and gender. Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos shows that this 'pioneer hobo' image is a misrepresentation by looking at works created by transient artists and thinkers, including travel literature, fiction, memoir, early feminist writing, poetry, sociology, political journalism, satire, and music. This book explores the diversity of meanings that accrue around 'the hobo' and 'the tramp'. It is the first analysis to frame transiency within a nineteenth-century literary tradition of the vagabond, a figure who attempts to travel without money. This book provide new ways for scholars to think about the activity and representation of US transiency.

Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America

Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America PDF Author: Justin Parks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009347829
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Furnishing a novel take on the poetry of the 1930s within the context of the cultural history of the Depression, this book argues that the period's economic and cultural crisis was accompanied by an epistemological crisis in which cultural producers increasingly cast doubt on language in its ability to represent society.

The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti

The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti PDF Author: Azelina Flint
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000416801
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
In an unprecedented comparison of two of the most important female authors of the nineteenth century, Azelina Flint foregrounds the influence of the religious communities that shaped Louisa May Alcott’s and Christina Rossetti’s visions of female creativity. In the early stages of the authors’ careers, their artistic developments were associated with their patrilineal connections to two artistic movements that shaped the course of American and British history: the Transcendentalists and Pre-Raphaelites. Flint uncovers the authors’ rejections of the individualistic outlooks of these movements, demonstrating that Alcott and Rossetti affiliated themselves with their mothers and sisters’ religious faith. Applying the methodological framework of women’s mysticism, Flint reveals that Alcott’s and Rossetti’s religious beliefs were shaped by the devotional practices and life-writing texts of their matrilineal communities. Here, the authors’ iconic portrayals of female artists are examined in light of the examples of their mothers and sisters for the first time. Flint recovers a number of unpublished life-writings, including commonplace albums and juvenile newspapers, introducing readers to early versions of the authors’ iconic works. These recovered texts indicate that Alcott and Rossetti portrayed the female artist as a mouthpiece for a wider community of women committed to social justice and divine communion. By drawing attention to the parallels in the authors’ familial affiliations and religious beliefs, Flint recuperates a tradition of nineteenth-century women’s mysticism that departs from the individualistic models of male literary traditions to locate female empowerment in gynocentric relationships dedicated to achieving a shared revelation of God.