Reclaiming Authorship
Subtitle: Literary Women in America, 1850-1900
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: June 30, 2006
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 255
ISBN-13: 9780812239423
Subjects: Literary studies: 19th century; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; USA; American - General; 19th century; American literature; History; History and criticism; United States; Women Authors; Women and literature
Description: "There was, in the nineteenth century, a distinction made between "writers" and "authors," Susan S. Williams notes, the former defined as those who composed primarily from mere experience or observation rather than from the unique genius or imagination of the latter. If women were more often cast as writers than authors by the literary establishment, there also emerged in magazines, advice books, fictional accounts, and letters a specific model of female authorship, one that valorized "natural" feminine traits such as observation and emphasis on detail, while also representing the distance between amateur writing and professional authorship." "Attending to biographical and cultural contexts and offering fresh readings of literary works, Reclaiming Authorship focuses on the complex ways writers such as Maria S. Cummins, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Abigail Dodge, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson put this model of female authorship into practice. Williams shows how it sometimes intersected with prevailing notions of male authorship and sometimes diverged from them, and how it is often precisely at those moments of divergence that authorship was reclaimed by women."--Jacket.