The Cambridge Companion To Nineteenth Century American Women S Writing

A 2001 Companion providing an overview of the history of writing by women in nineteenth-century America.

Recovers the careers of four US women serial writers, and establishes a new archive for American literary studies.

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Writing brings together chapters by leading scholars to provide innovative and comprehensive coverage of Victorian women writers' careers and literary achievements. While incorporating the scholarly insights of modern feminist criticism, it also reflects new approaches to women authors that have emerged with the rise of book history; periodical studies; performance studies; postcolonial studies; and scholarship on authorship, readership, and publishing. It traces the Victorian woman writer's career - from making her debut to working with publishers and editors to achieving literary fame - and challenges previous thinking about genres in which women contributed with success. Chapters on poetry, including a discussion of poetry in colonial and imperial contexts, reveal women's engagements with each other and male writers. Discussions on drama, life writing, reviewing, history, travel writing, and children's literature uncover the remarkable achievement of women in fields relatively unknown.

This Companion is the first critical collection of its kind devoted solely to American poetry of the nineteenth century. It covers a wide variety of authors, many of whom are currently being rediscovered. A number of anthologies in the recent past have been devoted to the verse of groups such as Native Americans, African-Americans and women. This volume offers essays covering these groups as well as more familiar figures such as Dickinson, Whitman, Longfellow and Melville. The contents are divided between broad topics of concern such as the poetry of the Civil War or the development of the 'poetess' role and articles featuring specific authors such as Edgar Allan Poe or Sarah Piatt. In the past two decades a growing body of scholarship has been engaged in reconceptualizing and re-evaluating this largely neglected area of study in US literary history - this Companion reflects and advances this spirit of revisionism.

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 conventional, sentimental, and overwritten. Harris shows that these conditions are actually narrative strategies, rooted in cultural imperatives and, paradoxically, integral to the later development of women's texts that call for women's independence. Working with actual women's diaries and letters, Harris first shows what contemporary women sought from the books they read. She then applies these reading strategies to the most popular novels of the period, proving that even the most apparently retrograde demonstrate their heroines' abilities to create and control areas culturally defined as male.

A wide-ranging and accessible account of the pioneering professional women writers who flourished during the Romantic period.