Author: Xiomara Santamarina
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080787700X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Book Description
According to nineteenth-century racial uplift ideology, African American women served their race best as reformers and activists, or as "doers of the word." In Belabored Professions, Xiomara Santamarina examines the autobiographies of four women who diverged from that ideal and defended the legitimacy of their self-supporting wage labor. Santamarina focuses on The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Eliza Potter's A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, and Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes. She argues that beyond black reformers' calls for abolitionist work, these former slaves and freeborn black women wrote about their own overlooked or disparaged work as socially and culturally valuable to the nation. They promoted the status of wage labor as a mark of self-reliance and civic virtue when many viewed African American working women as "drudges." As Santamarina demonstrates, these texts offer modern readers new perspectives on the emergence of the vital African American autobiographical tradition, dramatizing the degree to which black working women participated in and shaped American rhetorics of labor, race, and femininity.
Belabored Professions
Author: Xiomara Santamarina
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080787700X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Book Description
According to nineteenth-century racial uplift ideology, African American women served their race best as reformers and activists, or as "doers of the word." In Belabored Professions, Xiomara Santamarina examines the autobiographies of four women who diverged from that ideal and defended the legitimacy of their self-supporting wage labor. Santamarina focuses on The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Eliza Potter's A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, and Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes. She argues that beyond black reformers' calls for abolitionist work, these former slaves and freeborn black women wrote about their own overlooked or disparaged work as socially and culturally valuable to the nation. They promoted the status of wage labor as a mark of self-reliance and civic virtue when many viewed African American working women as "drudges." As Santamarina demonstrates, these texts offer modern readers new perspectives on the emergence of the vital African American autobiographical tradition, dramatizing the degree to which black working women participated in and shaped American rhetorics of labor, race, and femininity.
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080787700X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Book Description
According to nineteenth-century racial uplift ideology, African American women served their race best as reformers and activists, or as "doers of the word." In Belabored Professions, Xiomara Santamarina examines the autobiographies of four women who diverged from that ideal and defended the legitimacy of their self-supporting wage labor. Santamarina focuses on The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Eliza Potter's A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, and Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes. She argues that beyond black reformers' calls for abolitionist work, these former slaves and freeborn black women wrote about their own overlooked or disparaged work as socially and culturally valuable to the nation. They promoted the status of wage labor as a mark of self-reliance and civic virtue when many viewed African American working women as "drudges." As Santamarina demonstrates, these texts offer modern readers new perspectives on the emergence of the vital African American autobiographical tradition, dramatizing the degree to which black working women participated in and shaped American rhetorics of labor, race, and femininity.
Learning Legacies
Author: Sarah Ruffing Robbins
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472122843
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 373
Book Description
Examines pedagogy as a toolkit for social change, and the urgent need for cross-cultural collaborative teaching methods
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472122843
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 373
Book Description
Examines pedagogy as a toolkit for social change, and the urgent need for cross-cultural collaborative teaching methods
Capital Letters
Author: David Dowling
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587298341
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231
Book Description
In the 1840s and 1850s, as the market revolution swept the United States, the world of literature confronted for the first time the gaudy glare of commercial culture. Amid growing technological sophistication and growing artistic rejection of the soullessness of materialism, authorship passed from an era of patronage and entered the clamoring free market. In this setting, romantic notions of what it meant to be an author came under attack, and authors became professionals. In lively and provocative writing, David Dowling moves beyond a study of the emotional toll that this crisis in self-definition had on writers to examine how three sets of authors—in pairings of men and women: Harriet Wilson and Henry David Thoreau, Fanny Fern and Walt Whitman, and Rebecca Harding Davis and Herman Melville—engaged with and transformed the book market. What were their critiques of the capitalism that was transforming the world around them? How did they respond to the changing marketplace that came to define their very success as authors? How was the role of women influenced by these conditions? Capital Letters concludes with a fascinating and daring transhistorical comparison of how two superstar authors—Herman Melville in the nineteenth century and Stephen King today—have negotiated the shifting terrain of the literary marketplace. The result is an important contribution to our understanding of print culture and literary work.
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587298341
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231
Book Description
In the 1840s and 1850s, as the market revolution swept the United States, the world of literature confronted for the first time the gaudy glare of commercial culture. Amid growing technological sophistication and growing artistic rejection of the soullessness of materialism, authorship passed from an era of patronage and entered the clamoring free market. In this setting, romantic notions of what it meant to be an author came under attack, and authors became professionals. In lively and provocative writing, David Dowling moves beyond a study of the emotional toll that this crisis in self-definition had on writers to examine how three sets of authors—in pairings of men and women: Harriet Wilson and Henry David Thoreau, Fanny Fern and Walt Whitman, and Rebecca Harding Davis and Herman Melville—engaged with and transformed the book market. What were their critiques of the capitalism that was transforming the world around them? How did they respond to the changing marketplace that came to define their very success as authors? How was the role of women influenced by these conditions? Capital Letters concludes with a fascinating and daring transhistorical comparison of how two superstar authors—Herman Melville in the nineteenth century and Stephen King today—have negotiated the shifting terrain of the literary marketplace. The result is an important contribution to our understanding of print culture and literary work.
Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies
Author: Robert S. Levine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107095069
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261
Book Description
This book offers new perspectives on race and transnationalism in nineteenth-century American literary studies, and ranges widely in developing new approaches to canonical and non canonical authors. It will appeal to graduates and scholars working on nineteenth-century American literature, transnationalism, and African American literary studies.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107095069
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261
Book Description
This book offers new perspectives on race and transnationalism in nineteenth-century American literary studies, and ranges widely in developing new approaches to canonical and non canonical authors. It will appeal to graduates and scholars working on nineteenth-century American literature, transnationalism, and African American literary studies.
Dividing Lines
Author: Andreá N. Williams
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472028901
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 387
Book Description
One of the most extensive studies of class in nineteenth-century African American literature to date, Dividing Lines unveils how black fiction writers represented the uneasy relationship between class differences, racial solidarity, and the quest for civil rights in black communities. By portraying complex, highly stratified communities with a growing black middle class, these authors dispelled notions that black Americans were uniformly poor or uncivilized. The book argues that the signs of class anxiety are embedded in postbellum fiction: from the verbal stammer or prim speech of class-conscious characters to fissures in the fiction's form. Andreá N. Williams delves into the familiar and lesser-known works of Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, showing how these texts mediate class through discussions of labor, moral respectability, ancestry, spatial boundaries, and skin complexion. Dividing Lines also draws on reader responses—from book reviews, editorials, and letters—to show how the class anxiety expressed in African American fiction directly sparked reader concerns over the status of black Americans in the U.S. social order. Weaving literary history with compelling textual analyses, this study yields new insights about the intersection of race and class in black novels and short stories from the 1880s to 1900s.
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472028901
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 387
Book Description
One of the most extensive studies of class in nineteenth-century African American literature to date, Dividing Lines unveils how black fiction writers represented the uneasy relationship between class differences, racial solidarity, and the quest for civil rights in black communities. By portraying complex, highly stratified communities with a growing black middle class, these authors dispelled notions that black Americans were uniformly poor or uncivilized. The book argues that the signs of class anxiety are embedded in postbellum fiction: from the verbal stammer or prim speech of class-conscious characters to fissures in the fiction's form. Andreá N. Williams delves into the familiar and lesser-known works of Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, showing how these texts mediate class through discussions of labor, moral respectability, ancestry, spatial boundaries, and skin complexion. Dividing Lines also draws on reader responses—from book reviews, editorials, and letters—to show how the class anxiety expressed in African American fiction directly sparked reader concerns over the status of black Americans in the U.S. social order. Weaving literary history with compelling textual analyses, this study yields new insights about the intersection of race and class in black novels and short stories from the 1880s to 1900s.
Clothed in Meaning
Author: Sylvia Jenkins Cook
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472131966
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319
Book Description
The rise of both the empire of cotton and the empire of fashion in the nineteenth century brought new opportunities for sartorial self-expression to millions of ordinary people who could now afford to dress in style and assert their physical presence. Millions of laborers toiling in cotton fields and producing cotton cloth in industrial mills faced a brutal reality of exploitation, servitude, and regimentation—yet they also had a profound desire to express their selfhood. Another transformative force of this era—the rise of literary publication and the radical extension of literacy to the working class—opened an avenue for them to do so. Cloth and clothing provide potent tropes not only for physical but also for intellectual forms of self-expression. Drawing on sources ranging from fugitive slave narratives, newspapers, manifestos, and mill workers’ magazines to fiction, poetry, and autobiographies, Clothed in Meaning examines the significant part played by mill workers and formerly enslaved people, many of whom still worked picking cotton, in this revolution of literary self-expression. They created a new literature from their palpable daily intimacy with cotton, cloth, and clothing, as well as from their encounters with grimly innovative modes of work. In the materials of their labor they discovered vivid tropes for formulating their ideas and an exotic and expert language for articulating them. The harsh conditions of their work helped foster in their writing a trenchant irony toward the demeaning reduction of human beings to “hands” whose minds were unworthy of interest. Ultimately, Clothed in Meaning provides an essential examination of the intimate connections between oppression and luxury as recorded in the many different voices of nineteenth-century labor.
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472131966
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319
Book Description
The rise of both the empire of cotton and the empire of fashion in the nineteenth century brought new opportunities for sartorial self-expression to millions of ordinary people who could now afford to dress in style and assert their physical presence. Millions of laborers toiling in cotton fields and producing cotton cloth in industrial mills faced a brutal reality of exploitation, servitude, and regimentation—yet they also had a profound desire to express their selfhood. Another transformative force of this era—the rise of literary publication and the radical extension of literacy to the working class—opened an avenue for them to do so. Cloth and clothing provide potent tropes not only for physical but also for intellectual forms of self-expression. Drawing on sources ranging from fugitive slave narratives, newspapers, manifestos, and mill workers’ magazines to fiction, poetry, and autobiographies, Clothed in Meaning examines the significant part played by mill workers and formerly enslaved people, many of whom still worked picking cotton, in this revolution of literary self-expression. They created a new literature from their palpable daily intimacy with cotton, cloth, and clothing, as well as from their encounters with grimly innovative modes of work. In the materials of their labor they discovered vivid tropes for formulating their ideas and an exotic and expert language for articulating them. The harsh conditions of their work helped foster in their writing a trenchant irony toward the demeaning reduction of human beings to “hands” whose minds were unworthy of interest. Ultimately, Clothed in Meaning provides an essential examination of the intimate connections between oppression and luxury as recorded in the many different voices of nineteenth-century labor.
Advocates of Freedom
Author: Hannah-Rose Murray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108805132
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389
Book Description
During the nineteenth century and especially after the Civil War, scores of black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Moses Roper and Ellen Craft travelled to England, Ireland, Scotland, and parts of rural Wales to educate the public on slavery. By sharing their oratorical, visual, and literary testimony to transatlantic audiences, African American activists galvanised the antislavery movement, which had severe consequences for former slaveholders, pro-slavery defenders, white racists, and ignorant publics. Their journeys highlighted not only their death-defying escapes from bondage but also their desire to speak out against slavery and white supremacy on foreign soil. Hannah-Rose Murray explores the radical transatlantic journeys formerly enslaved individuals made to the British Isles, and what light they shed on our understanding of the abolitionist movement. She uncovers the reasons why activists visited certain locations, how they adapted to the local political and social climate, and what impact their activism had on British society.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108805132
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389
Book Description
During the nineteenth century and especially after the Civil War, scores of black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Moses Roper and Ellen Craft travelled to England, Ireland, Scotland, and parts of rural Wales to educate the public on slavery. By sharing their oratorical, visual, and literary testimony to transatlantic audiences, African American activists galvanised the antislavery movement, which had severe consequences for former slaveholders, pro-slavery defenders, white racists, and ignorant publics. Their journeys highlighted not only their death-defying escapes from bondage but also their desire to speak out against slavery and white supremacy on foreign soil. Hannah-Rose Murray explores the radical transatlantic journeys formerly enslaved individuals made to the British Isles, and what light they shed on our understanding of the abolitionist movement. She uncovers the reasons why activists visited certain locations, how they adapted to the local political and social climate, and what impact their activism had on British society.
The Good Body
Author: William M. Etter
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443818887
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
The Good Body: Normalizing Visions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 1836–1867 examines literary and cultural representations of so-called “normal” and “abnormal” bodies in the antebellum and Civil War-era United States and the ways in which these representations operated as a means of justifying, critiquing, and problematizing prominent concerns of the period: the relationship between the health of American citizens and national progress, Western expansion, debates over slavery, the threatened dissolution of the Union in the Civil War, and the legitimation of the post-war reunified nation. Considering a wide range of sources—classic works of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry; health reform textbooks; proslavery documents; photographs of Civil War veterans; and Civil War medical records of the federal government—this study demonstrates that American literature of this period typically imagined real and fictional bodies as healthy, aesthetically pleasing, and symbolically coherent in relation to other bodies imagined as deviating from these “norms” to preserve existing political and social orders but also, at times, to challenge the hegemonic power of US institutions. In addition to the literary material considered, central in this book are critical approaches to history and disability studies which illuminate the construction of physical “normality” and contribute to recent scholarly attempts to assess the significance of physical differences in the literature and culture of the United States.
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443818887
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
The Good Body: Normalizing Visions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 1836–1867 examines literary and cultural representations of so-called “normal” and “abnormal” bodies in the antebellum and Civil War-era United States and the ways in which these representations operated as a means of justifying, critiquing, and problematizing prominent concerns of the period: the relationship between the health of American citizens and national progress, Western expansion, debates over slavery, the threatened dissolution of the Union in the Civil War, and the legitimation of the post-war reunified nation. Considering a wide range of sources—classic works of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry; health reform textbooks; proslavery documents; photographs of Civil War veterans; and Civil War medical records of the federal government—this study demonstrates that American literature of this period typically imagined real and fictional bodies as healthy, aesthetically pleasing, and symbolically coherent in relation to other bodies imagined as deviating from these “norms” to preserve existing political and social orders but also, at times, to challenge the hegemonic power of US institutions. In addition to the literary material considered, central in this book are critical approaches to history and disability studies which illuminate the construction of physical “normality” and contribute to recent scholarly attempts to assess the significance of physical differences in the literature and culture of the United States.
A History of American Working-Class Literature
Author: Nicholas Coles
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108509029
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
A History of American Working-Class Literature sheds light not only on the lived experience of class but the enormously varied creativity of working-class people throughout the history of what is now the United States. By charting a chronology of working-class experience, as the conditions of work have changed over time, this volume shows how the practice of organizing, economic competition, place, and time shape opportunity and desire. The subjects range from transportation narratives and slave songs to the literature of deindustrialization and globalization. Among the literary forms discussed are memoir, journalism, film, drama, poetry, speeches, fiction, and song. Essays focus on plantation, prison, factory, and farm, as well as on labor unions, workers' theaters, and innovative publishing ventures. Chapters spotlight the intersections of class with race, gender, and place. The variety, depth, and many provocations of this History are certain to enrich the study and teaching of American literature.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108509029
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
A History of American Working-Class Literature sheds light not only on the lived experience of class but the enormously varied creativity of working-class people throughout the history of what is now the United States. By charting a chronology of working-class experience, as the conditions of work have changed over time, this volume shows how the practice of organizing, economic competition, place, and time shape opportunity and desire. The subjects range from transportation narratives and slave songs to the literature of deindustrialization and globalization. Among the literary forms discussed are memoir, journalism, film, drama, poetry, speeches, fiction, and song. Essays focus on plantation, prison, factory, and farm, as well as on labor unions, workers' theaters, and innovative publishing ventures. Chapters spotlight the intersections of class with race, gender, and place. The variety, depth, and many provocations of this History are certain to enrich the study and teaching of American literature.
African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880: Volume 5, 1865–1880
Author: Eric Gardner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108671527
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 574
Book Description
This volume offers the most nuanced treatment available of Black engagement with print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It locates and studies materials that many literary historians leave out of narratives of American culture. But as important as such recovery work is, African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880 also emphasizes innovative approaches, recognizing that such recovery inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. At the book's core is the recognition that many period texts - by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and William Wells Brown to Mattie Jackson and William Steward - are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key socio-historical and cultural trends in the nineteenth century. Chapters by leading scholars are grouped in three sections - 'Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities', 'Persons and Bodies', and 'Memories, Materialities, and Locations' - and focus on debates over race, nation, personhood, and print that were central to Reconstruction.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108671527
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 574
Book Description
This volume offers the most nuanced treatment available of Black engagement with print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It locates and studies materials that many literary historians leave out of narratives of American culture. But as important as such recovery work is, African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880 also emphasizes innovative approaches, recognizing that such recovery inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. At the book's core is the recognition that many period texts - by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and William Wells Brown to Mattie Jackson and William Steward - are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key socio-historical and cultural trends in the nineteenth century. Chapters by leading scholars are grouped in three sections - 'Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities', 'Persons and Bodies', and 'Memories, Materialities, and Locations' - and focus on debates over race, nation, personhood, and print that were central to Reconstruction.