In Plain Sight

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Socarides
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Familiar Figure ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Length Analysis

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.

LYRICAL STUDIES

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 521-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Jackson ◽  
Yopie Prins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Victorian Poetry ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
On Line ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Victorian Women Poets

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.”

scholarly journals Spending Time in the Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rieke Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Access Point ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Free Time ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Nineteenth Century American Literature ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
American Literary History

This special issue of New American Studies Journal: A Forum looks at nineteenth-century American literature and culture through the analytical lens of free time and leisure. This analytical framework affords a novel access point to American literary history—free time, as this special issue will explore, is a highly contested and politicized concept and resource of the nineteenth century, one that restructures temporalities and spaces. Nineteenth-century American culture and literature can be understood as an archive to explore free time as a significant social and economic innovation into the texture of individual life. The contributions to this special issue explore the rise of free time in the nineteenth century with particular attention toward temporal and spatial reconfigurations that free time afforded. Furthermore they explore the societal and cultural aspects of free time that grew around the logics and logistics of nineteenth-century capitalism—a social formation that made leisure, time off work, not merely possible, but that created entire industries and spaces for leisure and repose.

Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
First Century ◽  
British Romanticism

This book presents innovative readings of literary works of British Romanticism and its influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literary culture and thought. It traverses the traditional critical boundaries of prose and poetry in American and Romantic and post-Romantic writing. Analysing significant works by nineteenth-century writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, as well as the later writings of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Wallace Stevens, the book reasserts the significance of second-generation Romantic writers for American literary culture. Sandy reassesses our understanding of Romantic inheritance and influence on post-Romantic aesthetics, subjectivity and the natural world in the American imagination.

Anthology Publication and the Woman Poet

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-70
Author(s):  
Alexandra Socarides
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Moment ◽  
First Time

Chapter 1 investigates the moment at mid-century when American women’s poetry was, for the first time, being collected and marketed to a wide audience. By looking closely at the structures and visual components of the anthologies of the late 1840s, this chapter shows just how vexed the placement of the “American woman poet” into literary culture was. While women poets had been deployed in the service of a narrative about American literary culture earlier, it was with the creation of these anthologies that a whole host of conventions got embraced by writers and editors alike. By highlighting the diversity of approaches and poems contained within these anthologies, this chapter returns to the ways in which women’s poetry resisted being flattened into one kind of poem and women poets into one image.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 203-212
Author(s):  
Wendy Raphael Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Religious Radicalism ◽  
Literary Histories

Through examples of both print and manuscript poems, the conclusion argues that evangelicalism was a shift in the emphasis on aesthetics and its correct uses more than a theological tenet, and that revival poetry became a central part of not only eighteenth-, but nineteenth-century verse practices and beyond. These legacies, which include the revivalist poet-minister, the print itinerant, espousal piety, the Calvinist couplet, and women poet-minister personae, have important implications for later abolitionist poetry, the sentimental poetess, histories of racialized and gendered aesthetic capacities, the development of lyric address, and the integration of religious experience and practice in American literary history. Though elite defenders of enthusiasm tried to empty enthusiasm of religious radicalism and attach it to literary poetry, the eighteenth century (and beyond) saw the explosion of an enthusiastic poetry explicitly tied to religious revivalism. Ultimately, Roberts argues, literary scholars must grapple with how to write modern literary histories that account for people living with the gods fully present.

scholarly journals The New England Renaissance and American Literary Ethnocentrism

Prospects ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 409-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Buell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
American Intellectual History

Just as patriot orators invoked the spirit of Puritanism in their remonstrances against British tyranny, just as the nineteenth-century cult of Pilgrimism taught all America to look back upon the Pilgrim fathers as everyone's fathers, so modern American intellectual history has proclaimed the Puritan origins of the American way. The result has been a scholarly upsurge, during the past half-century, of “Puritan legacy” studies, of which Perry Miller was the prime mover and Sacvan Bercovitch is the leading contemporary theorist. So far as the interpretation of literary history is concerned, these studies have given a new authority and depth to the old New England-centered map of American literary tradition first drawn up by the Yankee-oriented genteel intellectual establishment of the late nineteenth century that presided over the literary institutions whose prestige had been built upon the reputation of the perpetrators of the antebellum New England Renaissance. The old-fashioned interpretation of American literary history and the new-fashioned interpretation of American civil religion as a nationalized version of Puritan ideology have combined to create a strong presumption, at least for specialists in New England Romantic literature, that theirs was the key formative moment in American literary history as a whole.

Country Matters: Rural Fiction, Urban Modernity, and the Problem of American Regionalism

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Storey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Hamlin Garland ◽  
American Literary History

Mark Storey, "Country Matters: Rural Fiction, Urban Modernity, and the Problem of American Regionalism" (pp. 192––213) This essay intervenes in the critical debates surrounding nineteenth-century American regionalism, arguing that such debates have tended to ignore the possibility of a shared and trans-regional category of "rural fiction." Developing this notion, I suggest that literary representations of rural life in the late nineteenth century are a crucial and neglected way of understanding the geographically indiscrete transformations of urban-capitalist modernity. Further, by examining these transformations through the prism of rural fiction, we can challenge the urban-centric tendency of postbellum American literary history. Drawing on several writers who have been the focus of much of critics' attentions on regionalism (Edward Eggleston, Hamlin Garland, and Sarah orne Jewett in particular), this essay considers both the generic and thematic instabilities of rural fiction, arguing that these instabilities serve to encode and refract the social and cultural context from which this fiction emerges. Reading rural fiction against the background of the increasing similarities between geographically distinct areas of rural life, and reconsidering many of the works that we currently gather under the regionalist rubric as, instead, rural, a distinct perspective can be gained on the standardizing and flattening processes of modernity itself.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document