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What we know of the marked body in nineteenth-century American literature and culture often begins with The Scarlet Letter's Hester Prynne and ends with Moby Dick's Queequeg. This study looks at the presence of marked men and women in a more challenging array of canonical and lesser-known works, including exploration narratives, romances, and frontier novels. Jennifer Putzi shows how tattoos, scars, and brands can function both as stigma and as emblem of healing and survival, thus blurring the borderline between the biological and social, the corporeal and spiritual. Examining such texts as Typee, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, The Morgesons, Iola Leroy, and Contending For...
"The book gives detailed attention to the principal trends in Dickinson scholarship during the past half-century: rhetorical and stylistic analysis of the poems and letters; biographical studies informed by theories of gender, sexuality, and by medical history; feminist studies of the poet's life and work; textual studies of the bound and unbound fascicles and the so-called worksheet drafts (or "scraps"); new assessments of the poet's social and cultural milieu, including influences on her spiritual sensibility; and of her theories of poetry, including lyricism."--BOOK JACKET.
This collection of essays provides new insights into the theme of inheritance in American women’s writing, ranging from Emily Dickinson’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s legacy to Meredith Sue Willis’s exploration of the tension between material inheritance and spiritual heritage in the Appalachian context. Using diverse critical and theoretical models, the twelve contributors examine women’s problematic relationship to inheritance in a variety of historical, geographical, and personal contexts, bringing to the fore a number of strategies of resistance and empowerment that have helped women cope with the burden or the lack of any inheritance through the centuries. Grouped into four ...
For generations, critics have noticed in nineteenth-century American women's sentimentality a streak of masochism, but their discussions of it have over-simplified its complex relationship to women's power. Marianne Noble argues that tropes of eroticized domination in sentimental literature must be recognized for what they were: a double-edged sword of both oppression and empowerment. She begins by exploring the cultural forces that came together to create this ideology of desire, particularly Protestant discourses relating suffering to love and middle-class discourses of "true womanhood." She goes on to demonstrate how sentimental literature takes advantage of the expressive power in the co...
"Recommended" by Choice Enterprising Youth examines the agenda behind the shaping of nineteenth-century children’s perceptions and world views and the transmission of civic duties and social values to children by adults. The essays in this book reveal the contradictions involved in the perceptions of children as active or passive, as representatives of a new order, or as receptacles of the transmitted values of their parents. The question, then, is whether the business of telling children's stories becomes an adult enterprise of conservative indoctrination, or whether children are enterprising enough to read what many of the contributors to this volume see as the subversive potential of these texts. This collection of literary and historical criticism of nineteenth-century American children’s literature draws upon recent assessments of canon formations, gender studies, and cultural studies to show how concepts of public/private, male/female, and domestic/foreign are collapsed to reveal a picture of American childhood and life that is expansive and constrictive at the same time.
An innovative collection of essays examining the sometimes paradoxical alignment of Realism and Naturalism with the Gothic in American literature to highlight their shared qualities Following the golden age of British Gothic in the late eighteenth century, the American Gothic’s pinnacle is often recognized as having taken place during the decades of American Romanticism. However, Haunting Realities explores the period of American Realism—the end of the nineteenth century—to discover evidence of fertile ground for another age of Gothic proliferation. At first glance, “Naturalist Gothic” seems to be a contradiction in terms. While the Gothic is known for its sensational effects, with...
In this study of Gilded Age literature and culture, Ben Railton proposes that in the years after Reconstruction, America's identity was often connected through distinct and competing conceptions of the nation's history. Concerned with key social questions such as race, Native Americans, women, and the South, "Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation" provided close readings of a number of texts for the ways they highlight these issues. This book examines established classics, newer additions to the canon, largely forgotten best-sellers, recovery gems, and autobiographical works by Douglass and Truth, poems by Harper and Piatt, and short stories by Woolson and Cooke. These readings contribute to ongoing conversations over historical literature's definition and value, and a greater understanding of not only American society in the Gilded Age, but also debates on our shared but contested history that remain very much alive in the present. -- From publisher's description.
This expansive Companion offers a set of fresh perspectives on the wealth of texts produced in and around what is now the United States. Highlights the diverse voices that constitute American literature, embracing oral traditions, slave narratives, regional writing, literature of the environment, and more Demonstrates that American literature was multicultural before Europeans arrived on the continent, and even more so thereafter Offers three distinct paradigms for thinking about American literature, focusing on: genealogies of American literary study; writers and issues; and contemporary theories and practices Enables students and researchers to generate richer, more varied and more comprehensive readings of American literature
The first book-length study of the figure of the black Indian in American Literature, this project explores themes of nation, culture, and performativity. Moving from the Post-Independence period to the Contemporary era, Byars-Nichols re-centers a marginalized group challenges stereotypes and conventional ways of thinking about race and culture.
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