Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351150227
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (511 download)

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Book Synopsis Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture by : Lucy Frank

Download or read book Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture written by Lucy Frank and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the famous deathbed scene of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Little Eva to Mark Twain's parodically morbid poetess Emmeline Grangerford, a preoccupation with human finitude informs the texture of nineteenth-century US writing. This collection traces the vicissitudes of this cultural preoccupation with the subject of death and examines how mortality served paradoxically as a site on which identity and subjectivity were productively rethought. Contributors from North America and the United Kingdom, representing the fields of literature, theatre history, and American studies, analyze the sexual, social, and epistemological boundaries implicit in nineteenth-century America's obsession with death, while also seeking to give a voice to the strategies by which these boundaries were interrogated and displaced. Topics include race- and gender-based investigations into the textual representation of death, imaginative constructions and re-constructions of social practice with regard to loss and memorialisation, and literary re-conceptualisations of death forced by personal and national trauma.

Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317087364
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion by : Mary McCartin Wearn

Download or read book Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion written by Mary McCartin Wearn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century American women’s culture was immersed in religious experience and female authors of the era employed representations of faith to various cultural ends. Focusing primarily on non-canonical texts, this collection explores the diversity of religious discourse in nineteenth-century women’s literature. The contributors examine fiction, political writings, poetry, and memoirs by professional authors, social activists, and women of faith, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Harriet E. Wilson, Sarah Piatt, Julia Ward Howe, Julia A. J. Foote, Lucy Mack Smith, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Fanny Newell. Embracing the complexities of lived religion in women’s culture-both its repressive and its revolutionary potential-Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion articulates how American women writers adopted the language of religious sentiment for their own cultural, political, or spiritual ends.

A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316033546
Total Pages : 718 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (16 download)

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Book Synopsis A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry by : Jennifer Putzi

Download or read book A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry written by Jennifer Putzi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 718 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry is the first book to construct a coherent history of the field and focus entirely on women's poetry of the period. With contributions from some of the most prominent scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, it explores a wide variety of authors, texts, and methodological approaches. Organized into three chronological sections, the essays examine multiple genres of poetry, consider poems circulated in various manuscript and print venues, and propose alternative ways of narrating literary history. From these essays, a rich story emerges about a diverse poetics that was once immensely popular but has since been forgotten. This History confirms that the field has advanced far beyond the recovery of select individual poets. It will be an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and critics of both the literature and the history of this era.

Death Becomes Her

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Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443810746
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Death Becomes Her by : Elizabeth Dill

Download or read book Death Becomes Her written by Elizabeth Dill and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dead and dying women are surely an age-old narrative trope. While associations of femininity with death have become almost prototypical in literary criticism and are familiar fodder for cultural conversations, the editors of Death Becomes Her offer us an opportunity to investigate the values that underlie such associations. But from where does our tireless investment in what constitutes a feminine death, a feminine reaction to death, and death’s courting of women emerge? These essays give voice to the idea that power and victimization are not opposites, but rather are complements in an operatic fantasy of intrigue, agency, absence and presence that pervades American writing and experience. Each chapter of Death Becomes Her offers a different lens to investigate the nature of death as surely more than just an anatomical matter: The penny press obsessively covers the death of a beautiful prostitute in 1840s Chicago; a novel of seduction becomes also a narrative of autopsy; a story of haunting allows women outlets for sexual license and the polemics of desire. Overall this volume invites readers to explore the ways in which death is portrayed as both an ornamentation of femininity and an ontological reality of it: how, put simply, “death becomes her.” Essays include analyses of women’s deathbed scenes, suicides, murders, funerals, and autopsies in literature and other nineteenth-century media. As such, the chapters in Death Becomes Her show how the authorial and readerly interest in scripting and staging women’s deaths is both intricate and abiding. They tell us that death is never, of course, simply about death, and they make relevant other issues, from linguistics to politics, as they inform the literature and lives of women from the late-eighteenth to early twentieth-century America. Taken together, the pieces in Death Becomes Her allow us greater access to the surrounding culture out of which the American woman emerges, performs, lives and dies. In doing so, they offer fresh insight into the often unsettling and highly relevant role of death in feminism.

Gothic Utterance

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Publisher : University of Wales Press
ISBN 13 : 1786837560
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (868 download)

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Book Synopsis Gothic Utterance by : Jimmy Packham

Download or read book Gothic Utterance written by Jimmy Packham and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gothic has always been interested in strange utterances and unsettling voices – from half-heard ghostly murmurings and the admonitions of the dead, to the terrible cries of the monstrous nonhuman. Gothic Utterance is the first book-length study of the role played by such voices in the Gothic tradition, exploring their prominence and importance in the American literature produced between the Revolutionary War and the close of the nineteenth century. The book argues that the American Gothic foregrounds the overpowering affect and distressing significations of the voices of the dead, dying, abjected, marginalised or nonhuman, in order to undertake a sustained interrogation of what it means to be and speak as an American in this period. The American Gothic imagines new forms of relation between speaking subjects, positing more inclusive and expansive kinds of community, while also emphasising the ethical demands attending our encounters with Gothic voices. The Gothic suggests that how we choose to hear and respond to these voices says much about our relationship with the world around us, its inhabitants – dead or otherwise – and the limits of our own subjectivity and empathy.

Speaking with the Dead in Early America

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Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812296419
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Speaking with the Dead in Early America by : Erik R. Seeman

Download or read book Speaking with the Dead in Early America written by Erik R. Seeman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-10-04 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In late medieval Catholicism, mourners employed an array of practices to maintain connection with the deceased—most crucially, the belief in purgatory, a middle place between heaven and hell where souls could be helped by the actions of the living. In the early sixteenth century, the Reformation abolished purgatory, as its leaders did not want attention to the dead diminishing people's devotion to God. But while the Reformation was supposed to end communication between the living and dead, it turns out the result was in fact more complicated than historians have realized. In the three centuries after the Reformation, Protestants imagined continuing relationships with the dead, and the desire for these relations came to form an important—and since neglected—aspect of Protestant belief and practice. In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, historian Erik R. Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead. Seeman chronicles the story of Protestants' relationships with the deceased from Elizabethan England to puritan New England and then on through the American Enlightenment into the middle of the nineteenth century with the explosion of interest in Spiritualism. He brings together a wide range of sources to uncover the beliefs and practices of both ordinary people, especially women, and religious leaders. This prodigious research reveals how sermons, elegies, and epitaphs portrayed the dead as speaking or being spoken to, how ghost stories and Gothic fiction depicted a permeable boundary between this world and the next, and how parlor songs and funeral hymns encouraged singers to imagine communication with the dead. Speaking with the Dead in Early America thus boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role.

Arcadian America

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300189052
Total Pages : 683 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Arcadian America by : Aaron Sachs

Download or read book Arcadian America written by Aaron Sachs and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps America's best environmental idea was not the national park but the garden cemetery, a use of space that quickly gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. Such spaces of repose brought key elements of the countryside into rapidly expanding cities, making nature accessible to all and serving to remind visitors of the natural cycles of life. In this unique interdisciplinary blend of historical narrative, cultural criticism, and poignant memoir, Aaron Sachs argues that American cemeteries embody a forgotten landscape tradition that has much to teach us in our current moment of environmental crisis. Until the trauma of the Civil War, many Americans sought to shape society into what they thought of as an Arcadia--not an Eden where fruit simply fell off the tree, but a public garden that depended on an ethic of communal care, and whose sense of beauty and repose related directly to an acknowledgement of mortality and limitation. Sachs explores the notion of Arcadia in the works of nineteenth-century nature writers, novelists, painters, horticulturists, landscape architects, and city planners, and holds up for comparison the twenty-first century's--and his own--tendency toward denial of both death and environmental limits. His far-reaching insights suggest new possibilities for the environmental movement today and new ways of understanding American history.

The Afterlife in Popular Culture

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 580 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (16 download)

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Book Synopsis The Afterlife in Popular Culture by : Kevin O'Neill

Download or read book The Afterlife in Popular Culture written by Kevin O'Neill and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-06-17 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Afterlife in Popular Culture: Heaven, Hell, and the Underworld in the American Imagination gives students a fresh look at how Americans view the afterlife, helping readers understand how it's depicted in popular culture. What happens to us when we die? The book seeks to explore how that question has been answered in American popular culture. It begins with five framing essays that provide historical and intellectual background on ideas about the afterlife in Western culture. These essays are followed by more than 100 entries, each focusing on specific cultural products or authors that feature the afterlife front and center. Entry topics include novels, film, television shows, plays, works of nonfiction, graphic novels, and more, all of which address some aspect of what may await us after our passing. This book is unique in marrying a historical overview of the afterlife with detailed analyses of particular cultural products, such as films and novels. In addition, it covers these topics in nonspecialist language, written with a student audience in mind. The book provides historical context for contemporary depictions of the afterlife addressed in the entries, which deal specifically with work produced in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Networking the Nation

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Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191035459
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Networking the Nation by : Alison Chapman

Download or read book Networking the Nation written by Alison Chapman and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-07-16 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did nineteenth-century women's poetry shift from the poetess poetry of lyric effusion and hyper-femininity to the muscular epic of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh? Networking the Nation re-writes women's poetic traditions by demonstrating the debt that Barrett Browning's revolutionary poetics owed to a circle of American and British women poets living in Florence and campaigning in their poetry and in their salons for Italian Unification. These women poets—Isa Blagden, Elizabeth Kinney, Eliza Ogilvy, and Theodosia Garrow Trollope—formed with Barrett Browning a network of poetry, sociability, and politics, which was devoted to the mission of campaigning for Italy as an independent nation state. In their poetic experiments with the active lyric voice, in their forging of a transnational persona through the periodical press, in their salons and spiritualist séances, the women poets formed a network that attempted to assert and perform an independent unified Italy in their work. Networking the Nation maps the careers of these expatriate women poets who were based in Florence in the key years of Risorgimento politics, racing their transnational social and print communities, and the problematic but schismatic shift in their poetry from the conventional sphere of the poetess. In the fraught and thrilling engagement with their adopted nation's revolutionary turmoil, and in their experiments with different types of writing agency, the women poets in this book offer revolutions of other kinds: revolutions of women's poetry and the very act of writing.

Discovering Quacks, Utopias, and Cemeteries

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Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1475832060
Total Pages : 155 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (758 download)

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Book Synopsis Discovering Quacks, Utopias, and Cemeteries by : Cynthia Williams Resor

Download or read book Discovering Quacks, Utopias, and Cemeteries written by Cynthia Williams Resor and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-06-21 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discovering Quacks, Utopias, and Cemeteries: Modern Lessons from Historical Themes​ explores two enduring issues – our age-old pursuit of better lives and how the media impacts our choices. In this unique approach to social history, each chapter opens with essential questions asking the reader to consider these issues in historical and modern life. The histories of fake cures, imaginary and real utopias, cemeteries, tombstones, and scrapbooks are explored from ancient times through the transformations caused by the Industrial Revolution into the twentieth century. Historical images, excerpts from primary source documents, and activities adaptable to learners of all ages are included to illustrate the role of historical media. Quacks, Utopias, and Cemeteries, the third in the daily life series by Cynthia Resor, is an ideal book for history enthusiasts, especially social studies teachers, education or humanities professors, museum educators, and anyone wanting to know about the lives of average people in the past.

Voices of Civil War America

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (161 download)

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Book Synopsis Voices of Civil War America by : Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr.

Download or read book Voices of Civil War America written by Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Letting ordinary people speak for themselves, this book uses primary documents to highlight daily life among Americans—Union and Confederate, black and white, soldier and civilian—during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Focusing on routines as basic as going to school and cooking and cleaning, Voices of Civil War America: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life explores the lives of ordinary Americans during one of the nation's most tumultuous eras. The book emphasizes the ordinary rather than the momentous to help students achieve a true understanding of mid-19th-century American culture and society. Recognizing that there is no better way to learn history than to allow those who lived it to speak for themselves, the authors utilize primary documents to depict various aspects of daily life, including politics, the military, economics, domestic life, material culture, religion, intellectual life, and leisure. Each of the documents is augmented by an introduction and aftermath, as well as lists of topics to consider and questions to ask.

Old Style

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Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812253531
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Old Style by : Claudia Stokes

Download or read book Old Style written by Claudia Stokes and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We celebrate innovation and experimentation, but Claudia Stokes reminds us that nineteenth-century American writers instead valued familiarity and traditionalism, which provided reliable markers of literary quality. Old Style examines the varied uses and expressions of unoriginality, which helped credential marginalized writers.

Mourning Lincoln

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300213565
Total Pages : 407 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Mourning Lincoln by : Martha Hodes

Download or read book Mourning Lincoln written by Martha Hodes and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historian examines how everyday people reacted to the president’s assassination in this “highly original, lucidly written book” (James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom). The news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on April 15, 1865, just days after Confederate surrender, astounded a war-weary nation. Massive crowds turned out for services and ceremonies. Countless expressions of grief and dismay were printed in newspapers and preached in sermons. Public responses to the assassination have been well chronicled, but this book is the first to delve into the personal and intimate responses of everyday people—northerners and southerners, soldiers and civilians, black people and white, men and women, rich and poor. Exploring diaries, letters, and other personal writings penned during the spring and summer of 1865, historian Martha Hodes captures the full range of reactions to the president’s death—far more diverse than public expressions would suggest. She tells a story of shock, glee, sorrow, anger, blame, and fear. “’Tis the saddest day in our history,” wrote a mournful man. It was “an electric shock to my soul,” wrote a woman who had escaped from slavery. “Glorious News!” a Lincoln enemy exulted, while for the black soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, it was all “too overwhelming, too lamentable, too distressing” to absorb. Longlisted for the National Book Award, Mourning Lincoln brings to life a key moment of national uncertainty and confusion, when competing visions of America’s future proved irreconcilable and hopes for racial justice in the aftermath of the Civil War slipped from the nation’s grasp. Hodes masterfully explores the tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination in human terms—terms that continue to stagger and rivet us today.

Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1003845347
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (38 download)

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Book Synopsis Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds by : Mathilde Vialard

Download or read book Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds written by Mathilde Vialard and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-02-26 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the recent academic interest in approaching health and wellbeing from a humanities perspective, Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds investigates how the Victorians dealt with questions of mental health by examining literary works in the genre of sensation fiction. The novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, two prominent writers of the genre, often portray characters suffering from mental illnesses commonly diagnosed at the time, among which are monomania, moral insanity, melancholia and hypochondria. By studying the fictional works of Braddon and Collins alongside medical texts from the nineteenth century, it sets out to investigate how these novels fictionally represented real mental sufferings. This book considers the different mental illnesses the characters of sensation novels develop inside and outside the home as they struggle to define their own identity against Victorian social expectations. It demonstrates how these novels fictionalised the crisis of the leisured upper classes, who spent most of their time at home, and found themselves at odds with a society that increasingly separated the domestic and working environments, while also considering the impact that a lack of a sense of domestic belonging could have on their mental health. Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds further analyses the extent to which domesticity—in its excess or lack—could afflict the mental health of Victorian men and women through the fictional representation of suicidal thoughts and acts in the novels of Braddon and Collins.

Suicide Century

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108307698
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (83 download)

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Book Synopsis Suicide Century by : Andrew Bennett

Download or read book Suicide Century written by Andrew Bennett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suicide Century investigates suicide as a prominent theme in twentieth-century and contemporary literature. Andrew Bennett argues that with the waning of religious and legal prohibitions on suicide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the increasing influence of medical and sociological accounts of its causes and significance in the twentieth century, literature responds to the act and idea as an increasingly normalised but incessantly baffling phenomenon. Discussing works by a number of major authors from the long twentieth century, the book explores the way that suicide makes and unmakes subjects, assumes and disrupts meaning, induces and resists empathy, and insists on and makes inconceivable our understanding of ourselves and of others.

Fair Copy

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Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812298098
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Fair Copy by : Jennifer Putzi

Download or read book Fair Copy written by Jennifer Putzi and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-10-29 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Fair Copy Jennifer Putzi studies the composition, publication, and circulation of American women's poetry in the antebellum United States. In opposition to a traditional scholarly emphasis on originality and individuality, or a recovery method centered on author-based interventions, Putzi proposes a theory and methodology of relational poetics: focusing on poetry written by working-class and African American women poets, she demonstrates how an emphasis on relationships between and among people and texts shaped the poems that women wrote, the avenues they took to gain access to print, and the way their poems functioned within a variety of print cultures. Yet it is their very relationality which has led to these poems and the poets who published them being written out of literary history. Fair Copy models a radical reading and recovery of this work in a way that will redirect the study of nineteenth-century American women's poetry. Beginning with Lydia Huntley Sigourney and ending with Elizabeth Akers Allen and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Putzi argues that relational practices like imitation, community, and collaboration distinguished the poetry of antebellum American women, especially those whose access to print was mediated by class or race. To demonstrate this point, she recovers poetry by the "factory girls" of the Lowell Offering, African American poet Sarah Forten, and domestic servant Maria James, whose volume Wales, and Other Poems was published in 1839. Putzi's work reveals a careful navigation of the path to print for each of these writers, as well as a fierce claim to poetry and all that it represented in the antebellum United States.

Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009442694
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (94 download)

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Book Synopsis Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction by : Sarah E. Chinn

Download or read book Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction written by Sarah E. Chinn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-30 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is a study of the ways that white radicals deployed the physical and literary image of amputation during the Civil War and Reconstruction to argue for full Black citizenship and against a national reconciliation that reimposed white supremacy. It gives readers a new way to think about the Civil War and Reconstruction.