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In the eighteenth century, literature meant learned writings; by the twentieth century, literature had come to be identified with imaginative, aesthetically significant works, and academic literary studies had developed special protocols for interpreting and valuing literary texts. Literature in the Making examines what happened in between: how literature came to be more precisely specified and valued; how it was organized into genres, canons, and national traditions; and how it became the basis for departments of modern languages and literatures in research universities. Modern literature, the version of literature familiar today, was an international invention, but it was forged when liter...
Before the Civil War, American writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe had established authorship as a respectable profession for women. But though they had written some of the most popular and influential novels of the century, they accepted the taboo against female writers, regarding themselves as educators and businesswomen. During and after the Civil War, some women writers began to challenge this view, seeing themselves as artists writing for themselves and for posterity. Writing for Immortality studies the lives and works of four prominent members of the first generation of American women who strived for recognition as serious literary artists: Louisa May Alc...
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Although famous during her lifetime, Kate Field (1838-1896) subsequently slipped into such a state of obscurity that in 1964, when the St. LouisAmerican published a bicentennial article to honor one of the city's most distinguished daughters, the eulogy bore the title "Who Was Kate Field?" Carolyn Moss has collected correspondence ranging over more than fifty years to allow Field to answer that question herself. Field was acquainted with, among numerous others, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Julia Ward Howe, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, the Brownings, and the Trollopes. Outside the world of literature, she hobnobbed with such men and women as Harriet Hosmer, Horace Greeley, Gilbert and Sullivan,...