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Mines have always been hard and dangerous places. They have also been as dependent upon imaginative writing as upon the extraction of precious materials. This study of a broad range of responses to gold and silver mining in the late nineteenth century sets the literary writings of figures such as Mark Twain, Mary Hallock Foote, Bret Harte, and Jack London within the context of writing and representation produced by people involved in the industry: miners and journalists, as well as writers of folklore and song. Floyd begins by considering some of the grand narratives the industry has generated. She goes on to discuss particular places and the distinctive work they generated-the short fictions of the California Gold Rush, the Sagebrush journalism of Nevada's Comstock Lode, Leadville romance, and the popular culture of the Klondike. With excursions to Canada, South Africa, and Australia, Floyd looks at how the experience of a destructive and chaotic industry produced a global literature.

This essay considers Viola Meynell’s work on Melville during the early 1920s. Although there have long been claims for the importance of her 1920 edition of Moby-Dick in drawing the attention of a fresh generation of writers to Melville, little attention has been paid to the sources of Meynell’s interest in Moby-Dick or to the position of her work within established narratives of the British recovery of Melville. The discussion here sets Meynell’s passionate advocacy for Melville alongside that of her sometime friend and fellow Modernist, D.H. Lawrence, before turning to look at how her understanding of Melville’s work speaks to traditions of interest in the author that have become obscure: women’s reading of Melville, the positioning of his work within a tradition of British fiction and his appeal to writers drawn to Catholicism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This essay revisits prevailing assumptions about the domestic kitchen. While the status of this space and even its existence as a discrete area within the home have become a maater for discussion, the work of cooking located in the kitchen remains a compelling subject within a range of popular cultural forms. We are accustomed to thinking of the kitchen as a scene of routine and ritual, but here I explore its appearances as an improvisatory and rebellious zone. Such possibilities are not necessarily the outcome of shifting practices associated with the postmodern home and its representation. On the contrary, the kitchen has long been a space, both intimate and socially significant, from which to generate arguments about gender, class and nation.

This article examines the periodical culture of 1860s San Francisco, a challenging and brittle print culture environment for editors and writers. It focusses on the Golden Era and the collective life it produced, in its pages, for the city's unstable population. The Era celebrated a masculine culture of street and saloon, while making social and literary convention the focus of aggressive attack. Writers in this setting developed their assault on literary form in a range of material that dismantled popular modes of writing and pressed questions about writing and reading on its audiences. Their work constitutes a distinctive strain of western writing during this period, by turns critical of and indifferent to contemporary forms of representation of the cultures of the region. It also develops a mode of response to industrial urban experience during this period that makes an address to readers nationally and internationally as well as locally.

Some of the content that appears routinely in letters written home by Anglo-American emigrants to the western territories and states of the U. S. in the middle of the nineteenth century deals with common issues: the ‘usual problems’ of sickness, ‘loss of citizenship and home’ and adapting to ‘the type of lifestyle’ required there.¹ Discussion of the malarial fevers that plagued newly arrived settlers is ever-present in these letters, as (predictably) are references to the vast distance between writer and addressee, alongside dour commentaries on unwelcome aspects of the region and its inhabitants. This kind of unsurprising material has been

If the \"product\" of music \"lacks all concreteness and disappears without trace\", the \"visual experience of its production is crucial to musicians and audience alike for locating and communicating the place of music and musical sound within society and culture\".3 We think of Gilded Age Americans as preoccupied with what Miriam Bailin describes as the \"rigid inhibition of physical and emotional exposure\", but bodily power and its public display was the sine qua non of operatic and concert performance.4 Thus, one of the most pressing questions raised by the female singer during this period had to do with the relationship between the singer herself- this female with a mind, a soul, a career - and the powerful sound made by her body. [...]the great Italian operas of the era often showed female transgression punished by lingering disease and death.10 In contrast, the German repertoire that dominated American classical music making during this period also included operas by Beethoven and Wagner that gave a majestic grasp of events to physically active, even physically passionate women characters. Barbara Freedman, discussing the female singer, cites Hélène Cixous' comment that \"men and women are caught up in an ideological theatre where the multiplication of representations, images, reflections, myths, identifications renders all conceptualizations null and void\".11 Such a comment should remind us that we generalize about the ways in which the classical repertoire of late nineteenth-century America positioned female singers in physical terms at our peril, but it may also alert us to the multiplicity of femininities available to the singer, many of which directly addressed women's physical life as well as providing roles so demanding as to bring her physical strength and the strength of her voice to the audience's immediate attention. Hester chokes in response to her little stepson's comments; Daniel twice chokes on his words; there are references to the choking sound of water. [...]while physical breakdown is the result of Hester's endeavor, both she and Daniel have been in poor health:

Early in 1844 Eliza Farnham (1815–64) was appointed to the post of matron at the first purpose-built women's prison, the women's section of Mount Pleasant Prison in New York, the institution popularly known as Sing Sing. Her appointment, which she won through her connection with Horace Greeley and the reforming circles of New York, brought her, at first, a burst of favourable attention and subsequently considerable notoriety. The precise reasons for this reversal are a matter of varying interpretations, but the defining impulse of Farnham's tenure at Sing Sing is not: Farnham's particular interest was in campaigning for phrenology, perhaps the most popular of the new psychologies of the period, as a means to diagnose and cure female prisoners. This psychological science was based on the premise that there was a match between character and the outer shape and protuberances of the head; character could be read by studying the head's surface. During this period, phrenology was often linked with the figure of the criminal, indeed phrenology first evolved in the work of Franz-Joseph Gall and was subsequently frequently explained through descriptions of prisoners and the inhabitants of asylums. Farnham was a pivotal figure in the argument for phrenology's efficacy in treating prisoners in New York in the mid-1840s.