Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth-Century American Women's Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World

by Beth L. Lueck (Editor), Sirpa Salenius (Editor), Nancy Lusignan Schultz (Editor)

Overview

This unique interdisciplinary essay collection offers a fresh perspective on the active involvement of American women authors in the nineteenth-century transatlantic world. Internationally diverse contributors explore topics ranging from women's social and political mobility to their authorship and activism. While a number of essays focus on such well-known writers as Margaret Fuller, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, other, perhaps lesser-known authors are also included, such as E. D. E. N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Peabody, Jeannette Hart, and Laura Richards.

These essays show the spectrum of interests and activities in which nineteenth-century women were involved as they moved, geographically and metaphorically, toward gaining their independence and the right to control their lives. Traveling far and wide—to Italy, France, Great Britain, and the Bahamas—these writers came into contact with realities far different from their own. On topics ranging from homeopathy and literary endeavors to politics and revolution, they conversed with others, reaching and inspiring transnational audiences with their words and deeds, and creating a space for self-expression in the rapidly changing transatlantic world.

Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781512600278
Publisher:	University of New Hampshire Press
Publication date:	12/06/2016
Series:	Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

BETH L. LUECK is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. SIRPA SALENIUS is a senior lecturer at the University of Eastern Finland. NANCY LUSIGNAN SCHULTZ is a professor of English at Salem State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Women Conversing on Culture, Society, and Politics—Beth L. Lueck, Sirpa Salenius, and Nancy Lusignan Schultz
PART 1. REPORTS ON THE RISORGIMENTO
“My Readers Will Thank Me”: J.-C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Civil Liberty, and Transatlantic Sympathy in Catharine Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841)—Lucinda L. Damon-Bach
Margaret Fuller’s Transatlantic Vistas: Newspapers and Nation Building—Sonia Di Loreto
Margaret Fuller and Giuseppe Mazzini: Between Faith and Fate—Gigliola Sacerdoti Mariani
Margaret Fuller’s Transatlantic Journey as a Model for Intercultural Development—Mariarosa Mettifogo
PART 2. TRANSATLANTIC EXCHANGES WITH ITALIAN CULTURE
Margaret Fuller’s “Raphael’s Deposition from the Cross” and the Tribune Letters: The Mater Dolorosa’s Tripartite Rites of Passage—Joan R. Wry
Veins Full of Fire: Margaret Fuller’s Symbols of Social Transformation—Jeffrey Steele
Pulling Strings: The Transatlantic Influence of Marionettes on American Women Writers—Debra J. Rosenthal
Among the Prophets: Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot in Italy—Rita Bode
“A Country of Whose Language I Knew Not a Word”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman in and on Italy—Denise D. Knight
PART 3. ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ATLANTIC WORLD
Elizabeth Peabody, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and the Transatlantic Homeopathic Politics of Reform—Cécile Roudeau
Joseph Sturge, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Free-Labor Movement—R. J. Ellis
Heaven and Manufacturing: Political Dissent in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Foothold in Britain—Stephanie Palmer
Bahama Triangle: Europe, America, and the Bahamas in Hart’s Letters from the Bahama Islands, written in 1823–4—Elizabeth T. Kenney
Crossing the White Atlantic as a Woman Artist—Shirley Samuels
Transatlantic Perspectives in the Fiction of E. D. E. N. Southworth: People and Places—Joyce W. Warren
“Spinsters for Ever!”: Girls Abroad in Louisa May Alcott’s Travelogues—Daniela Daniele
Edward Lear’s American “Sister”: The Nonsense Poetry of Laura E. Richards Reconsidered—Etti Gordon Ginzburg
Contributors
Index

What People are Saying About This

Phyllis Cole

“This is a wonderfully rich array of essays on American women’s transatlanticism: it expands beyond England to Italy and other sites, beyond the Grand Tour to creative work and political and racial representation, beyond traditional literary forms to letters, periodicals, visual art, critical reception, and popular culture. Conversations travel in both directions, engaging Europeans as well as Americans. Readers will be rewarded with many surprises and a new, wider map of cosmopolitan culture.”

Susan Belasco

This outstanding collection of sophisticated, engaging studies focuses on courageous and bold women who traveled and reported -- through letters, articles, essays, fiction, and poems -- on their complex social, artistic, and literary engagements with Italy, France, Great Britain, and the Caribbean.

From the Publisher

“This outstanding collection of sophisticated, engaging studies focuses on courageous and bold women who traveled and reported—through letters, articles, essays, fiction, and poems—on their complex social, artistic, and literary engagements with Italy, France, Great Britain, and the Caribbean.”—“This outstanding collection of sophisticated, engaging studies focuses on courageous and bold women who traveled and reported—through letters, articles, essays, fiction, and poems—on their complex social, artistic, and literary engagements with Italy, France, Great Britain, and the Caribbean.”
“This is a wonderfully rich array of essays on American women’s transatlanticism: it expands beyond England to Italy and other sites, beyond the Grand Tour to creative work and political and racial representation, beyond traditional literary forms to letters, periodicals, visual art, critical reception, and popular culture. Conversations travel in both directions, engaging Europeans as well as Americans. Readers will be rewarded with many surprises and a new, wider map of cosmopolitan culture.”—“This is a wonderfully rich array of essays on American women’s transatlanticism: it expands beyond England to Italy and other sites, beyond the Grand Tour to creative work and political and racial representation, beyond traditional literary forms to letters, periodicals, visual art, critical reception, and popular culture. Conversations travel in both directions, engaging Europeans as well as Americans. Readers will be rewarded with many surprises and a new, wider map of cosmopolitan culture.”

Editorial Reviews

"This outstanding collection of sophisticated, engaging studies focuses on courageous and bold women who traveled and reported—through letters, articles, essays, fiction, and poems—on their complex social, artistic, and literary engagements with Italy, France, Great Britain, and the Caribbean."—Susan Belasco, professor emerita of English, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

From the Publisher