The Creation of Emily Dickinson and the Study of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry

Author(s):  
Mary Loeffelholz
Telegraphies ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Kay Yandell

In nineteenth-century America, Native Americans communicated long distance with smoke signals and Indian sign language to combat U.S. invasions across the American plains. Recently immigrated Morse telegraphers began to organize “online” for safer working conditions. Women telegraphers entered electric speech forums. These interactions inspired the creation of what this book dubs “telegraph literature”—the fiction, poetry, social critique, and autobiography that experiences of telecommunication inspired authors from vastly different social locations to write throughout nineteenth-century America. The telegraphic virtual inspired such canonical authors as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, alongside such lesser known authors as Lida Churchill and Crow medicine woman Pretty Shield, to explore how seemingly instantaneous, disembodied, nationwide speech practices challenged American conceptions of self, text, place, nation, and God.


Author(s):  
Alexandra Socarides

In Plain Sight explores how the poetry of nineteenth-century American women that was once so visible within American culture could have, with the exception of that by Emily Dickinson, so thoroughly disappeared from literary history. By investigating erasure not merely as something that was done to these women but as the result of the conventions that once made the circulation of their poetry possible in the first place, this book offers the first book-length analysis of the conventions of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry. In doing so, In Plain Sight makes visible a whole field of poetry that has been long forgotten. In order to recover this field instead of its individual women poets, each of the chapters focuses on a specific convention and its participation in the construction of literary history. Taken together they tell the complicated story of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, tracing the spaces within literary culture where it lived and thrived, the spaces from which its authors were always in the process of vanishing. By inhabiting those spaces, we can see both the conventions that were taken up with such gusto that they made the woman poet a familiar figure to nineteenth-century readers and the specter of obscurity and unreadability that are embedded within them. By reclaiming these conventions as a constitutive part of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, this book asks readers to take seriously the work these women produced and the role their work might play in remapping American literary history.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 616-635
Author(s):  
Kristof Loockx

This article examines the migration trajectories of seafarers who worked on Belgian merchant vessels departing from the port of Antwerp during the second half of the nineteenth century. Based on the Antwerp seamen’s registry, which recorded information on voyages of seafarers on Belgian merchant vessels departing from Belgium’s main commercial port, this article shows that Antwerp’s maritime recruitment area vastly expanded with the advent of steam. The proportion of low-skilled seafarers who originated from inland areas increased as a result of the creation of new departments aboard ship and the emergence of ocean liners. However, established migration fields remained important for the supply of skilled labour in deck departments, which indicates that there was also continuity. The findings suggest that each department had its own dynamics and therefore old and new patterns co-evolved during a period of transition.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Scott Travanion Connors

Abstract This article explores the emergence of reformist sentiment and political culture in Madras in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, it contributes to, and expands upon, the growing body of literature on colonial petitioning through a case-study of a mass petition demanding education reform. Signed in 1839 by 70,000 subjects from across the Madras presidency, the petition demanded the creation of a university that would qualify western-educated Indians to gain employment in the high public offices of the East India Company. Through an analysis of the lifecycle of this education petition, from its creation to its reception and the subsequent adoption of its demands by the Company government at Fort St George, this article charts the process by which an emergent, politicized public engaged with, and critiqued, the colonial state. Finally, it examines the transformative effect that the practice of mass petitioning had on established modes of political activism and communication between an authoritarian colonial state and the society it governed.


2007 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL NUGENT

ABSTRACTThis article begins with a quotation from a local informant highlighting a perception in the Gambia/Casamance borderlands that there is a pattern linking the violence of the later nineteenth century with more recent troubles. It argues that there is some merit in this thesis, which is encapsulated in a concatenation of events: systematic raiding by Fodé Sylla led to the creation of a relatively depopulated colonial border zone which was later filled by Jola immigrants from Buluf to the southeast. In the perception of some, it is these immigrants who attracted the MFDC rebels. Mandinkas and Jolas of Fogny Jabankunda and Narang, and Karoninkas from the islands of Karone have therefore been largely unreceptive to appeals to Casamance nationalism. The article also argues that there are more twisted historical connections. Whereas in the later nineteenth century, the Jolas associated Islam with violent enslavement, they later converted en masse. Their attitude towards Fodé Sylla remained negative, whilst the Mauritanian marabout, Cheikh Mahfoudz, was credited with the introduction of a pacific form of Islam that valorized hard work and legitimated physical migration. This legacy has posed a further barrier to militant nationalism. Islam and violence remain linked, but the signs have been reversed.


1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 521-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Jackson ◽  
Yopie Prins

THE VICTORIAN POETESS has become as important a figure in the late twentieth century as she was in the late nineteenth — perhaps because she seems now, as then, to have lapsed into the obscurity of literary history. In recent years feminist critics have been interested in reclaiming a tradition of nineteenth-century popular poetesses whose verse circulated broadly on both sides of the Atlantic. A spate of new anthologies, annotated editions, and critical collections (as well as texts now available on-line) has reintroduced supposedly lost women poets into the canon of Victorian poetry. Indeed, this recovery is often predicated on a rhetoric of loss, as if only by losing women poets we can rediscover and read them anew. Thus in recent advertisements for such anthologies, we read that Victorian Women Poets (edited by Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds in 1995) “aims to recover the lost map of Victorian women’s poetry,” and British Women Poets of the 19th Century (edited by Margaret Higonnet in 1996) “restores the voices and reputations of these ‘lost’ artists”; likewise, the compendious Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (edited by Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow with Cath Sharrock in 1996) “rediscovers rich and diverse female traditions.”


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