The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers

by Joyce W. Warren

Overview

The American literary canon has been the subject of debate and change for at least a decade.  As women writers and writers of color are being rediscovered and acclaimed, the question of whether they are worthy of inclusion remains open.

The (Other) American Traditions brings together for the first time in one place, essays on individual writers and traditions that begin to ask the harder questions. How do we talk about these writers once we get beyond the historical issues?  How is their work related to their male counterparts? How is it similar: how is it different? Are differences related to gender or race or class? How has the selection of books in the literary canon (Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, and James) led to a definition of the American tradition that was calculated to exclude women? Do we need a new critical vocabulary to discuss these works? Should we stop talking about a tradition and begin to talk about many traditions? How did black American women writers develop strategies for speaking out when they were doubly in jeopardy of being ignored as blacks and as women? The volume offers irrefutable proof that the writers, the critics who work on their texts, all these questions, and the expansion of the canon matter very much indeed.

Contributors: Nina Baym, Deborah Carlin, Joanne Dobson, Josephine Donovan, Judith Fetterley, Frances Smith Foster, Susan K. Harris, Karla F.C. Holloway, Paul Lauter, Diane Lichtenstein, Carla L. Peterson, Carol J. Singley, Jane Tompkins, Joyce W. Warren and Sandra A. Zagarell.

    

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813519111
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	02/01/1993
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)
Lexile:	1590L (what's this?)

About the Author

Joyce W. Warren is the author of Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman; The American Narcissus: Individualism and Women in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction; and editor of the volume on Fanny Fern in the American Women Writers series (all Rutgers University Press).

Table of Contents

Susanna Rowson, father of the American novel / Jane Tompkins
Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie : radical frontier romance / Carol J. Singley
Reinventing Lydia Sigourney / Nina Baym
Domesticity and the economics of independence : resistance and revolution in the work of Fanny Fern / Joyce W. Warren
Harriet Jacobs's Incidents and the "careless daughters" (and sons) who read it / Frances Smith Foster
Only a story, not a romance : Harriet Beecher Stowe's The pearl of Orr's Island / Judith Fetterley
Eaconomies of space : markets and marketability in Our nig and Iola Leroy / Karla F.C. Holloway
"America" as community in three antebellum village sketches / Sandra A. Zagarell
The American renaissance reenvisioned / Joanne Dobson
"Doers of the word" : theorizing African-American women writers in the antebellum North / Carla L. Peterson. (cont.) "What methods have brought blessing" : discourses of reform in philanthropic literature / Deborah Carlin
Breaking the sentence : local-color literature and subjugated knowledges / Josephine Donovan
The tradition of American Jewish women writers / Diane Lichtenstein
"But is it any good?" : evaluating nineteenth-century American women's fiction / Susan K. Harris
Teaching nineteenth-century women writers / Paul Lauter