Title: Neglected American women writers of the long nineteenth century : progressive pioneers /
Authors: Laschinger, Verena, 1971-; Salenius, Sirpa,
Year: 2019
Subjects: American literature Women authors History and critcism.; American literature History and criticism; Women and literature United States History; American literature.; Women and literature; Frauenliteratur; United States; USA
Abstract: Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Verena Laschinger and Sirpa Salenius, is a collection of essays that offer a fresh perspective and original analyses of texts by American women writers of the long nineteenth century. The essays, which are written both by European and American scholars, discuss fiction by marginalized authors including Yolanda DuBois (African American fairy tales), Laura E. Richards (children's literature), Metta Fuller Victor (dime novels/ detective fiction), and other pioneering writers of science fiction, gothic tales, and life narratives. The works covered by this collection represent the rough and ragged realities that women and girls in the nineteenth century experienced; the writings focus on their education, family life, on girls as victims of class prejudice as well as sexual and racial violence, but they also portray girls and women as empowering agents, survivors, and leaders. They do so with a high-voltage creative charge. As progressive pioneers, who forayed into unknown literary terrain and experimented with a variety of genres, the neglected American women writers introduced in this collection themselves emerge as role models whose innovative contribution to nineteenth-century literature the essays celebrate.
Contents: Progressive Pioneers: Recovering Voices of Women -- On Children. Legacies of Music, Slave Narratives, and Autobiography: Harriet Jacobs and Bessie Jones / Gayle Murchison -- Save the Child: Sentimental Politics and Matters of (De-)Composition in Metta Fuller Victor's The Dead Letter / Verena Laschinger -- The Nursery Hermaphrodite and Other Outrageous Children's Rhymes by Laura E. Richards / Etti Gordon Ginzburg -- Embracing Ambiguity: Navigating the Liminal Waters of Grace King's The Little Convent Girl / Khristeena Lute -- Doubly Radical: Girls in The Brownies' Book Reshaping Gender Ideologies / Sirpa Salenius -- Nationalism, Print Capitalism and the Perversity of Propaganda: Imagining Zora Neale Hurston Coming of Age / DaMaris B. Hill -- On Adults. Margaret Fuller: a Romantic "New Woman" Poised Between Text and Life / Jelena ¿esnic -- Private Secrets and Open Sources: Political Authorship in Sara Payson Willis (Fanny Fern) and Margaret Fuller / Asunción López-Varela Azcárate -- Metta Fuller Victor's Visual Poetics in The Dead Letter and The Figure Eight: From "The Talking Oak" to "The Lady of Shalott" / Stéphanie Durrans -- Lost and Found: Harriet Prescott Spofford's Telling of Her Story / Rita Bode -- Prophetic Dramas: The Time Travel Narratives of Harriet Hosmer and Frances Power Cobbe / Kate Culkin -- My natural instincts as a gentleman: The Infatuated Detective in Anna Katharine Green's The Leavenworth Case / Ralph J. Poole -- Between the Pagan and the Puritan: Queering the Binary in Madeline Yale Wynne's "The Little Room" / H.J.E. Champion.