Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930
Examines the intersection of male and female spheres in American literature

Although they wrote in the same historical milieu as their male counterparts, women writers of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries have generally been "ghettoized" by critics into a separate canonical sphere. These original essays argue in favor of reconciling male and female writers, both historically and in the context of classroom teaching.
While some of the essays pair up female and male authors who write in a similar style or with similar concerns, others address social issues shared by both men and women, including class tensions, economic problems, and the Civil War experience. Rather than privileging particular genres or certain well-known writers, the contributors examine writings ranging from novels and poetry to autobiography, utopian fiction, and essays. And they consider familiar figures like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson alongside such lesser-known writers as Melusina Fay Peirce, Susie King Taylor, and Mary Gove Nichols.
 
Each essay revises the binary notions that have been ascribed to males and females, such as public and private, rational and intuitive, political and domestic, violent and passive. Although they do not deny the existence of separate spheres, the contributors show the boundary between them to be much more blurred than has been assumed until now.

 
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Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930
Examines the intersection of male and female spheres in American literature

Although they wrote in the same historical milieu as their male counterparts, women writers of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries have generally been "ghettoized" by critics into a separate canonical sphere. These original essays argue in favor of reconciling male and female writers, both historically and in the context of classroom teaching.
While some of the essays pair up female and male authors who write in a similar style or with similar concerns, others address social issues shared by both men and women, including class tensions, economic problems, and the Civil War experience. Rather than privileging particular genres or certain well-known writers, the contributors examine writings ranging from novels and poetry to autobiography, utopian fiction, and essays. And they consider familiar figures like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson alongside such lesser-known writers as Melusina Fay Peirce, Susie King Taylor, and Mary Gove Nichols.
 
Each essay revises the binary notions that have been ascribed to males and females, such as public and private, rational and intuitive, political and domestic, violent and passive. Although they do not deny the existence of separate spheres, the contributors show the boundary between them to be much more blurred than has been assumed until now.

 
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Overview

Examines the intersection of male and female spheres in American literature

Although they wrote in the same historical milieu as their male counterparts, women writers of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries have generally been "ghettoized" by critics into a separate canonical sphere. These original essays argue in favor of reconciling male and female writers, both historically and in the context of classroom teaching.
While some of the essays pair up female and male authors who write in a similar style or with similar concerns, others address social issues shared by both men and women, including class tensions, economic problems, and the Civil War experience. Rather than privileging particular genres or certain well-known writers, the contributors examine writings ranging from novels and poetry to autobiography, utopian fiction, and essays. And they consider familiar figures like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson alongside such lesser-known writers as Melusina Fay Peirce, Susie King Taylor, and Mary Gove Nichols.
 
Each essay revises the binary notions that have been ascribed to males and females, such as public and private, rational and intuitive, political and domestic, violent and passive. Although they do not deny the existence of separate spheres, the contributors show the boundary between them to be much more blurred than has been assumed until now.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780817357795
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Publication date: 07/30/2014
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 320
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Monika M. Elbert is Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University, New Jersey.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction Monika M. Elbert 1

Part I Intertextuality and Authorial Interconnectedness

1 To Be a "Parlor Soldier": Susan Warner's Answer to Emerson's "Self-Reliance" Luanda L. Damon-Bach 29

2 "Astra Castra": Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford Katharine Rodier 50

3 The War of Susie King Taylor Karen S. Nulton 73

4 No Separations in the City: The Public-Private Novel and Private-Public Authorship Karen E. Waldron 92

Part II Body Politics: Framing the Female Body

5 The Ungendered Terrain of Good Health; Mary Gove Nichols's Rewriting of the Diseased Institution of Marriage Dawn Keetiey 117

6 Male Doctors and Female Illness in American Women's Fiction, 1850-1900 Frederick Newberry 143

7 Gender Bending: Two Role-Reversal Utopias by Nineteenth-Century Women Darby Lewes 158

Part III On the Home Front and Beyond: Domesticity and the Marketplace

8 A Homely Business: Melusina Fay Peirce and Late-Nineteenth-Century Cooperative Housekeeping Lisette Nadine Gibson 179

9 Narratives of Domestic Imperialism: The African-American Home in the Colored American Magazine and the Novels of Pauline Hopkins, 1900-1903 Debra Bernardi 203

10 Public Women, Private Acts: Gender and Theater in Turn-of-the-Century American Novels Jennifer Costello Brezina 225

Part IV Sentimental Subversions

11 Gender Valences of Transcendentalism: The Pursuit of Idealism in Elizabeth Oakes-Smiths "The Sinless Child" Mary Louise Kete 245

12 Sentimental Epistemologies in Uncle Tom's Cabin and The House of the Seven Gables Marianne Noble 261

13 "I Try to Make the Reader Feel": The Resurrection of Bess Streeter Aldrich's A Lantern in Her Hand and the Politics of the Literary Canon Denise D. Knight 282

Contributors 297

Index 301

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