ABSTRACT

Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Verena Laschinger and Sirpa Salenius, is a collection of essays that offer a fresh perspective and original analyses of texts by American women writers of the long nineteenth century. The essays, which are written both by European and American scholars, discuss fiction by marginalized authors including Yolanda DuBois (African American fairy tales), Laura E. Richards (children’s literature), Metta Fuller Victor (dime novels/ detective fiction), and other pioneering writers of science fiction, gothic tales, and life narratives. The works covered by this collection represent the rough and ragged realities that women and girls in the nineteenth century experienced; the writings focus on their education, family life, on girls as victims of class prejudice as well as sexual and racial violence, but they also portray girls and women as empowering agents, survivors, and leaders. They do so with a high-voltage creative charge. As progressive pioneers, who forayed into unknown literary terrain and experimented with a variety of genres, the neglected American women writers introduced in this collection themselves emerge as role models whose innovative contribution to nineteenth-century literature the essays celebrate.

chapter |14 pages

Progressive Pioneers

Recovering Voices of Women

part I|83 pages

On Children

chapter 1|12 pages

Legacies of Music, Slave Narratives and Autobiography

Harriet Jacobs and Bessie Jones

chapter 2|15 pages

Save the Child

Sentimental Politics and Matters of (De-) Composition in Metta Fuller Victor's The Dead Letter

chapter 4|12 pages

Embracing Ambiguity

Navigating the Liminal Waters of Grace King's "The Little Convent Girl"

chapter 5|13 pages

Doubly Radical

Girls in The Brownies' Book Reshaping Gender Ideologies

chapter 6|16 pages

Nationalism, Print Capitalism and the Perversity of Propaganda

Imagining Zora Neale Hurston Coming of Age

part II|105 pages

On Adults

chapter 7|15 pages

Margaret Fuller

A Romantic "New Woman" Poised Between Text and Life

chapter 8|14 pages

Private Secrets and Open Sources

Political Authorship in Sara Payson Willis (Fanny Fern) and Margaret Fuller

chapter 9|11 pages

Metta Fuller Victor's Visual Poetics in The Dead Letter and The Figure Eight

From “The Talking Oak” to “The Lady of Shalott”

chapter 10|17 pages

Lost and Found

Harriet Prescott Spofford's Telling of Her Story

chapter 11|15 pages

Prophetic Dramas

The Time Travel Narratives of Harriet Hosmer and Frances Power Cobbe

chapter 13|15 pages

Between the Pagan and the Puritan

Queering the Binary in Madeline Yale Wynne's “The Little Room”