You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This study proposes interpretive strategies for nineteenth-century American women's novels. Harris contends that women in the nineteenth century read subversively, 'processing texts according to gender based imperatives'. Beginning with Susannah Rowson's best-selling seduction novel Charlotte Temple (1791), and ending with Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913), Harris scans white, middle-class women's writing throughout the nineteenth century. In the process she both explores reading behaviour and formulates a literary history for mainstream nineteenth-century American women's fiction. Through most of the twentieth century, women's novels of the earlier period have been denigrated as conventiona...
WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE A scholar accompanies Twain on his journey around the world In Mark Twain, the World, and Me: “Following the Equator,” Then and Now, Susan K. Harris follows Twain’s last lecture tour as he wound his way through the British Empire in 1895–1896. Deftly blending history, biography, literary criticism, reportage, and travel memoir, Harris gives readers a unique take on one of America’s most widely studied writers. Structured as a series of interlocking essays written in the first person, this engaging volume draws on Twain’s insights into the histories and cultures of Australia, India, and South Africa and weaves them into tim...
When the U.S. liberated the Philippines from Spanish rule in 1898, the exploit was hailed at home as a great moral victory, an instance of Uncle Sam freeing an oppressed country from colonial tyranny. The next move, however, was hotly contested: should the U.S. annex the archipelago? The disputants did agree on one point: that the United States was divinely appointed to bring democracy--and with it, white Protestant culture--to the rest of the world. They were, in the words of U.S. Senator Albert Beveridge, "God's arbiters," a civilizing force with a righteous role to play on the world stage. Mining letters, speeches, textbooks, poems, political cartoons and other sources, Susan K. Harris ex...
Even our youngest students have lots of stories to tell, whether real or imagined. How can we create entry points for writing, so that all writers feel confident and motivated to share their stories? How can we establish a classroom community of beginning writers where equity, empathy, and compassion become part of the process and vital by-products of story writing? Enter story workshop, a structure for early literacy that amplifies the relationship between play, art, and writing. Children develop ideas and stories through choices of art materials. By creating images through play, story workshop invites children to explore the "amazingness" (Nisa, age 10) of their ideas in a variety of art f...
For almost 30 years, scholars and advocates have been exploring the interaction and potential between the rights and well-being of women and the promise of international law. This collection posits that the next frontier for international law is increasing its relevance, beneficence and impact for women in the developing world, and to deal with a much wider range of issues through a feminist lens.
Huckleberry Finn dressing as a girl is a famously comic scene in Mark Twain's novel but hardly out of character--for the author, that is. Twain "troubled gender" in much of his otherwise traditional fiction, depicting children whose sexual identities are switched at birth, tomboys, same-sex married couples, and even a male French painter who impersonates his own fictive sister and becomes engaged to another man. This book explores Mark Twain's extensive use of cross-dressing across his career by exposing the substantial cast of characters who masqueraded as members of the opposite sex or who otherwise defied gender expectations. Linda Morris grounds her study in an understanding of the era's...
Donald J. Greiner's provocative new study evaluates the fiction of ten contemporary female novelists to ask questions about gender relations in American fiction. Looking closely at the reaction of female writers to what Greiner describes as a central paradigm of American literature - men bonding in the wilderness in an attempt to escape women and the social restrictions they represent - Greiner contends that female novelists have not only adopted the venerable model but also adapted it so that women venture into the wilderness while excluding men from the quest. Greiner first shows how such contemporary white male novelists as Frederick Busch, John Irving, and Larry Woiwode modify the litera...
"Boy meets girl. Boy proposes to girl. Girl refuses proposal. Then what?This provocative scenario provides the frame for a significant countertradition in popular nineteenth-century women's novels: the double-proposal plot, in which the heroine rejects and later accepts proposals from the same suitor. Exploring the American wing of this movement through the novels of Carolyn Hentz, Augusta Evans, Laura J. Curtis Bullard, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Karen Tracey investigates how each of these writers is constrained by her historical circumstances and how she uses her fiction to critique those circumstances.Pioneered in Britain by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront, and Eliz...
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
Jane Elton is left orphaned by both of her parents who die due to unpredictable ailments.After this traumatic experience, Jane is taken in by herselfish and overbearing aunt Mrs. Wilson's. Faced with a repressive Calvinism practiced by her aunt, and the conservative and rural mentality of her new New England home, Jane longs to break free. She grows up to be a beautiful young woman who catches the eye of many gentlemen lurking around Mrs. Wilson's residence. Still struggling to identify with who she really, while constantly conflicting with her aunt, Jane chooses one of her wooers and marries him out of desperation, although her heart is with another man. Her struggles continue in form of a romantic triangle threatening to end fatally, with many other obstacles standing in the way of her happiness.