Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture
Provides paratextual readings of Anglophone and Hispanophone poems about celebrities, panics, pandemics and colonisation in the nineteenth-century United States
- Fills a gap in the scholarship of nineteenth-century poetry by critically engaging the paratext as an aesthetic design and practice
- Reveals more clearly and immediately that nineteenth-century newspaper poems were not self-enclosed aesthetic objects separate from public life. Many of these verses were not simply read but also memorized and quoted, reworked and imitated, collected, scrapbooked, anthologized, edited, and exchanged within and outside of complex paratextual spaces in tune with the readerly needs of consumers
- Raises important and difficult questions about how readers engaged newspaper poems, and particularly, how they understood poetic speakers
Drawing examples from over 200 English-language and Spanish-language newspapers and periodicals published between January 1855 and October 1901, Paratextuality in Anglophone and Hispanophone Poems in the US Press, 1855–1901 argues that nineteenth-century newspaper poems are inherently paratextual. The paratextual situation of many newspaper poems (their links to surrounding textual items and discourses), their editorialisation through circulation (the way poems were altered from newspaper to newspaper) and their association and disassociation with certain celebrity bylines, editors and newspaper titles enabled contemporaneous poetic value and taste that, in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, were not only sentimental, Romantic and/or genteel. In addition to these important categories for determining a good and bad poem, poetic taste and value were determined, Bonifacio argues, via arbitrary consequences of circulation, paratextualisation, typesetter error and editorial convenience.
New research on Freeman’s fiction that challenge and expand earlier feminist readings of the female realm
- Contextualizes key developments in Freeman criticism since 1991
- Moves beyond an analysis of the short stories for which Freeman is best known to examine her novels Pembroke (1894), Madelon (1896), and The Portion of Labor (1901); stories for youths and uncollected stories; and post-1902 fiction from her late career
- Updates approaches to Freeman by considering ecocriticism, race, labor and class, transnationalism
- Reconsiders periodization: Freeman is read as a modernist and a World War One writer whose long, evolving career questions critical readings of her work within the confines of turn-of-the-century realism and regionalism
- Raises important questions about single-author scholarship and argues for new critical views that go beyond the single author
- Involves a transatlantic array of scholars (based in the US, the UK, Finland, France, Turkey, Lithuania) at different stages of their career—from some long-time specialists of Freeman to some international PhD students
Freeman is best known today for her short regionalist fiction. Recently, Freeman studies have taken new turns including ecocriticism, trauma studies, the Gothic, and queer theory. The essay collection pushes these developments further. Contributors aim at revisiting and going beyond Freeman’s regionalism. They challenge earlier feminist readings of the female realm by arguing that her short fiction and novels depict women and girls as violent and criminal, suffocating as well as nurturing; they bring to light questions of race and ethnicity that have been conspicuously absent from scholarship on Freeman, as well as issues of class. Because questions of women’s work are central to Freeman’s oeuvre, this collection discusses Freeman’s acumen as a businesswoman herself, a participant as well as a castigator of turn-of-the-century US capitalism. Finally, essays reconsider the periodization of Freeman by exploring her little acknowledged post-1902 and therefore post-marriage fiction—her war stories and her urban stories.
Examines how women writers of medical fiction rewrite cultural narratives of the female body against censorship under the Comstock Laws
- Offers an original contribution to the study of nineteenth-century American literature that recovers and examines lesser-known texts by canonical nineteenth-century women writers
- Contributes to the emerging fields of medical fiction, medicine and literature, and medical humanities by examining how one group of women writers intervenes in discourses of reproductive health during a period of censorship
- Brings disability theory and affect theory into productive conversations that explore the limitations of social construction and materiality, and offers empathy as a discursive method of resolving tensions in each field
- Offers a new theory of (p)rescription that accounts for the role of narrative as an apparatus in ongoing identity formations linked to disability, race, and gender
(P)rescription Narratives reveals how the act of narrative creates the subjects of disability, race, and gender during a period of censorship in American history. In a Crip Affect reading of woman-authored medical fiction from the Comstock law era, this book astutely argues that women writers of medical fiction practice storytelling as a form of narrative medicine that prescribes various forms of healing as an antidote to the shame engineered by an American culture of censorship. Woman-authored medical fiction exposes the limitations of social construction and materiality in conversations about the female body since subject formation relies upon multiple force relations that shape and are shaped by one another in ongoing processes that do not stop despite our efforts to interpret cultural artifacts. These multiple failures – to censor, to resist, to interpret – open up a space for negotiating how we engage the world with greater empathy.
A state of the field essay collection that offers new models for analysing time, space, self and politics in nineteenth-century American culture
- Provides new terminology for considering nineteenth-century selfhood
- Maps hitherto unexplored terrains, real and imaginary, in nineteenth-century America
- Defines alternative and often surprising political systems that framed nineteenth-century American literature
Across four parts of exploratory, creative and speculative essays, this book provides provocative frameworks and readings of canonical and non-canonical literature. The essays cover off-the-map places, warped historical chronologies, excessive selves, unlikely meetings and systemic incommensurability. Collectively they define original methods, categories and terrains for the study of the American cultural past. Altogether, this collection interrogates some of the most dominant critical moves of the past two decades and proposes alternative ways of working and thinking with the American nineteenth century.
An in-depth examination of liminality and race in early US fiction
- Offers a Critical Whiteness study of early US fiction with innovative readings of canonical and lesser-known texts
- Brings together fiction and multiple discourses on White racial identity in the early US: natural history, medical science, blackface minstrelsy, abolitionism and anti-abolitionism, mesmerism, spiritualism
- Contributes to ongoing work in early US fiction race studies by reading White male characters as figures of otherness
Hannah Lauren Murray shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated White racial identity in the new nation. In a Critical Whiteness reading of canonical and lesser-known texts from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb, Murray argues that White characters on the border between life and death were liminal presences that disturbed prescriptions of racial belonging in the early US. Fears of losing Whiteness were routinely channelled through the language of liminality, in a precursor to today’s White anxieties of marginalisation and minoritisation.
Analyses Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson against the background of Anglo-American print culture and oral performance
- Develops a new analytical framework for the study of nineteenth-century transatlantic writing that combines literary studies, book history and cultural sociology
- Reframes canonical works through unfamiliar texts and contexts
- Draws on a rich body of archival sources and historical periodical publications
- Offers an in-depth account of nineteenth-century Anglo-American print culture and the transatlantic lecture system
Examining the transatlantic writings and professional careers of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, this book explores the impact of literary, cultural, political and legal manifestations of authority on nineteenth-century British and American writing, publishing and lecturing. Drawing on primary texts in conjunction with a rich body of archival sources, this study retraces Romantic debates about race and nationhood, analyses the relationship between cultural nationalism and literary historiography and sheds light on Carlyle’s and Emerson’s professional identities as publishing authors and lecturing celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic.
