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Amy E. Earhart is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Texas A & M University.
James L. Machor offers a sweeping exploration of how American fiction was received in both public and private spheres in the United States before the Civil War. Machor takes four antebellum authors—Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Catharine Sedgwick, and Caroline Chesebro'—and analyzes how their works were published, received, and interpreted. Drawing on discussions found in book reviews and in private letters and diaries, Machor examines how middle-class readers of the time engaged with contemporary fiction and how fiction reading evolved as an interpretative practice in nineteenth-century America. Through careful analysis, Machor illuminates how the reading practices of nineteenth-cen...
Uncle Tom's Cabin continues to provoke impassioned discussions among scholars; to serve as the inspiration for theater, film, and dance; and to be the locus of much heated debate surrounding race relations in the United States. It is also one of the most remarkable print-based texts in U.S. publishing history. And yet, until now, no book-length study has traced the tumultuous publishing history of this most famous of antislavery novels. Among the major issues Claire Parfait addresses in her detailed account are the conditions of female authorship, the structures of copyright, author-publisher relations, agency, and literary economics. To follow the trail of the book over 150 years is to trac...
This text argues for a new understanding of the relation between nineteenth-century realist literary form and the socially dense environments of modernity.
This volume offers a new introduction to the American Renaissance, exploring many of the key themes, genres, and social and cultural contexts that inform the best new scholarship in the field.
The texts included in this anthology illustrate the wide range of possibilities that abolitionist writings offered to American children during the first half of the nineteenth century. Composing their works under the wings of the antislavery movement, authors responded to the unequal and controversial development of abolitionist politics during the decades that led up to the outbreak of the Civil War. These writers struggled to teach children “to feel right,” and attempted to instruct them to actively respond to the injustice of the slavery system as rendered visible by a harrowing visual archive of suffering bodies compiled by both English and American antislavery promoters. Reading was...
Political Prayer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature explores how American women writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Emily Dickinson translated petitioning – a political form for redress of grievances with religious resonance, or what Strand calls “political prayer” – in their literary works. At a time when petitioning was historically transforming governments, mobilizing masses, and democratizing North America, these White women writers wrote “literary petitions” to advocate for others in social justice causes such as antiremoval, antislavery, and labor reform, to transform American literature and culture, and to arti...
"For decades, Virginia Woolf's work has been seen as part of the "women's writing" canon. Elizabeth Abel extracts Woolf from this women's tradition to position her in a different light, one that shows Woolf's role in a far-reaching modernist genealogy. Abel traces the strong echoes of Woolf in the work of four major writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. As Abel shows, what Woolf called the "odd affinities" between herself and these successors give us an altogether different picture of the development of transnational modernism, with Woolf as a shadowy but important connection among disparate writers. By charting new pathways of twentieth-century literary transmission, Odd Affinities will appeal to students and scholars working in New Modernist studies, comparative literature, and African American studies"--
Glamour is an alluring but elusive concept. We most readily associate it with fashion, industrial design, and Hollywood of the Golden Age, and yet it also shaped the language and interests of high modernism. In Glamour in Six Dimensions, Judith Brown looks at the historical and aesthetic roots of glamour in the early decades of the twentieth century, arguing that glamour is the defining aesthetic of modernism. In the clean lines of modernism she finds the ideal conditions for glamour-blankness, polish, impenetrability, and the suspicion of emptiness behind it all. Brown focuses on several cultural products that she argues helped to shape glamour's meanings: the most significant perfume of th...
"This biography explores the life of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), a major nineteenth-century American poet and one of the first African American writers to garner international attention and praise in the wake of emancipation. While Dunbar is perhaps best known for poems such as 'Sympathy' (a poem that ends 'I know why the caged bird sings!') and 'We Wear the Mask,' he wrote prolifically in many genres, including a newspaper he produced with his friends Orville and Wilbur Wright in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Before his early death he published fourteen books of poetry, four collections of short stories, and four novels, and also collaborated on theatrical productions, including the...