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"Kilcup, Karen L"
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Fallen forests : emotion, embodiment, and ethics in American women's environmental writing, 1781-1924
\"In 1844, Lydia Sigourney asserted, \"Man's warfare on the trees is terrible.\" Like Sigourney many American women of her day engaged with such issues as sustainability, resource wars, globalization, voluntary simplicity, Christian ecology, and environmental justice. Illuminating the foundations for contemporary women's environmental writing, Fallen Forests shows how their nineteenth-century predecessors marshaled powerful affective, ethical, and spiritual resources to chastise, educate, and motivate readers to engage in positive social change. Fallen Forests contributes to scholarship in American women's writing, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and feminist rhetoric, expanding the literary, historical, and theoretical grounds for some of today's most pressing environmental debates. Karen L. Kilcup rejects prior critical emphases on sentimentalism to show how women writers have drawn on their literary emotional intelligence to raise readers' consciousness about social and environmental issues. She also critiques ecocriticism's idealizing tendency, which has elided women's complicity in agendas that depart from today's environmental orthodoxies. Unlike previous ecocritical works, Fallen Forests includes marginalized texts by African American, Native American, Mexican American, working-class, and non-Protestant women. Kilcup also enlarges ecocriticism's genre foundations, showing how Cherokee oratory, travel writing, slave narrative, diary, polemic, sketches, novels, poetry, and expose intervene in important environmental debates\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Fostering the Future: Lydia Maria Child's Environmental Engagements in The Juvenile Miscellany and Beyond
Often conflating the second into the first- depicting Indigenous peoples as \"natural\" and aligned with nonhuman animals- they authored histories, poems, novels, and tracts for both adults and children.1 Editing and writing for The Juvenile Miscellany- as well as contributing children's books and essays outside that venue- Lydia Maria Child spoke beyond her contemporaries' norms, reinventing imperialist natural history discourses, captivity narratives, and histories of America's settlement. Child educated young people and their mothers about early relations between settlers and Native Americans and problematized conventional notions of \"civilized\" and \"savage,\" as she invested Indigenous peoples with personhood and told harsh truths that would propel Americans toward a more just future. Child's work thus comprehends the interconnections among racial justice, environmental access and agency, cultural and political sovereignty, and human rights that drive contemporary social justice activists.2 Child tests her innovative ideas in nascent form in her early story \"Adventure in the Woods,\" in which she promotes mutual respect and education. First Settlers constructs a pedagogical dialogue between \"Mother\" and two daughters that revises normative histories of settlement and Indian wars, inverting the categories \"civilized\" and \"savage.\" Daughter Caroline, for example, asserts, \"I think, mother, it is somewhat extraordinary, that the...
Journal Article
Fallen Forests
In 1844, Lydia Sigourney asserted, \"Man's warfare on the trees is terrible.\" Like Sigourney many American women of her day engaged with such issues as sustainability, resource wars, globalization, voluntary simplicity, Christian ecology, and environmental justice. Illuminating the foundations for contemporary women's environmental writing, Fallen Forests shows how their nineteenth-century predecessors marshaled powerful affective, ethical, and spiritual resources to chastise, educate, and motivate readers to engage in positive social change. Fallen Forests contributes to scholarship in American women's writing, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and feminist rhetoric, expanding the literary, historical, and theoretical grounds for some of today's most pressing environmental debates. Karen L. Kilcup rejects prior critical emphases on sentimentalism to show how women writers have drawn on their literary emotional intelligence to raise readers' consciousness about social and environmental issues. She also critiques ecocriticism's idealizing tendency, which has elided women's complicity in agendas that depart from today's environmental orthodoxies. Unlike previous ecocritical works, Fallen Forests includes marginalized texts by African American, Native American, Mexican American, working-class, and non-Protestant women. Kilcup also enlarges ecocriticism's genre foundations, showing how Cherokee oratory, travel writing, slave narrative, diary, polemic, sketches, novels, poetry, and exposé intervene in important environmental debates.
eBook
Feeling American in the Poetic Republic
Recent scholarship concerning nineteenth-century American poetry has challenged petrified attitudes that depict it as almost exclusively sentimental, unoriginal, and meritless. Yet, absent a historicized conceptual framework for assessing the considerable achievements of these poets, we still undervalue and oversimplify their work. Poetry reviews published between 1820 and 1840 show how properly calibrated emotion shaped readers’ tastes and identities, individual and national, in what I call the poetic republic: a country in which nearly everyone read, wrote, or heard verse. Critics’ appraisals intimate their anxious investment in creating authentic American poetry. Given British contentions that Americans were uncivilized, this anxiety coalesced around several related questions: How should writers approach the subject of Indians? What affective stances should poets assume? Was sentimental discourse, especially on Native Americans, inherently “savage”? This essay illuminates the period’s genre norms, concurrently questioning two current critical conventions. Demonstrating how poetry—including its producers and its publics—participated energetically in American nation-building, the essay complicates Benedict Anderson’s assumption that newspapers and novels singularly shaped national self-concepts. It also establishes how sentimentalism was attacked much earlier than today’s scholarship asserts. Simultaneously accommodating and disciplining wilderness (whether formulated as untamed nature and its wild inhabitants, or as uncontrolled, feminized sentimentality), reviewers collectively endorsed dispassionate, elevated nature poetry—often inhabited by Native Americans—as prototypically American, while they disparaged affective excess that they typically gendered as feminine. These verse norms strongly impacted the reception and reputations of the period’s two principal poets, William Cullen Bryant and Lydia Sigourney.
Journal Article
Scarlet Experiments: Dickinson’s New English and the Critics
“Scarlet Experiments” frames Dickinson’s poetic practice and later reputation within the context of elite nineteenth-century reviewing and the norms that evaluators established; it focuses on such publications as the North American Review and on judgments concerning her regional contemporaries. Critics’ agitation suggests they felt that potentially unruly poets might defy their normative pronouncements, and that such disruptive writers required explicit chastisement and remediation. Dickinson clearly represents extreme intractability. How does her “New English” speak to the reviewers, particularly to their criterion of originality? How might we understand Dickinson’s perspective and practice differently when we contemplate these evaluations? Examining critics’ views on New England poets and poetry during three moments—1848, the early 1860s, and the decade following her death—illuminates how aesthetic standards may have informed Dickinson’s early development, her most intensely productive period, and her posthumous reputation, especially in relation to how gender informed (and deformed) critics’ responses to female poets, of whom they typically demanded greater conventionality. Reading reviews, Dickinson might have feared significant critical chastisement for her aesthetic experiments and for exploring troubling psychological states, yet she might also have seen reason to feel encouraged. I show how the transforming critical climate finally ensured the poet’s audibility and even popularity; responses to her work illuminate particularly the 1890s period of interpretive innovation. Dickinson’s appearance was perfectly timed to provoke controversy, and her work upended both poetry and criticism, ultimately helping transform the standards for what counted as original American poetry.
Journal Article
From Beacon Hill to the Crystal Palace
Because prior studies of American women's travel writing have focused exclusively on middle-class and wealthy travelers, it has been difficult to assess the genre and its participants in a holistic fashion. One of the very few surviving working-class travel diaries, Lorenza Stevens Berbineau's account provides readers with a unique perspective of a domestic servant in the wealthy Lowell family in Boston. Staying in luxurious hotels and caring for her young charge Eddie during her six-month grand tour, Berbineau wrote detailed and insightful entries about the people and places she saw.
Contributing to the traditions of women's, diary, and travel literature from the perspective of a domestic servant, Berbineau's narrative reveals an arresting and intimate outlook on both her own life and the activities, places, and people she encounters. For example, she carefully records Europeans' religious practices, working people and their behavior, and each region's aesthetic qualities. Clearly writing in haste and with a pleasing freedom from the constraints of orthographic and stylistic convention, Berbineau offers a distinctive voice and a discerning perspective. Alert to nuances of social class, her narrative is as appealing and informative to today's readers as it no doubt was to her fellow domestics in the Lowell household.
Unobtrusively edited to retain as much as possible the individuality and texture of the author's original manuscript,From Beacon Hill to the Crystal Palaceoffers readers brief framing summaries, informative endnotes, and a valuable introduction that analyzes Berbineau's narrative in relation to gender and class issues and compares it to the published travel writing of her famous contemporary, Harriet Beecher Stowe.
eBook
Writing in the Real World
The essays collected in this special issue of Legacy address a number of recurrent concerns among the approximately 350 author- or theme-based presentations: performance, identity, genre, the meaning of home, issues of mentoring, and the concept of \"legacies\" - the relationship between generations of women writers.2 Most broadly, however, in one way or another all of the essays here tackle the inevitable imbrication of public and private domains.3 The remarks that follow invert the conventional structuring of introductory essays. Both on stage and in staged photographs, Sarah Winnemucca was adept at re-presenting herself to white authences as the \"Indian Princess\"; in her performances, Pauline Johnson appeared first in \"buckskin\" and then in European evening wear; in the West, Ora Eddleman Reed offered \"Types of Indian Girls\" to readers of Twin Territories, a magazine published in Indian Territory in the late nineteenth century, repudiating stereotypes of Cherokees as savage but also \"playing Indian\" herself.7 In elaborating the historical context, Ruth Spack's essay exposes for public view some of the backstage elements of Zitkala-Sa's selfcreation.
Journal Article
“Frightful Stories”: Captivity, Conquest, and Justice in Lydia Maria Child’s Native Narratives
Lydia Maria Child’s Native American children’s stories comprehend the interconnections among racial justice, environmental agency, sovereignty, and human rights. To engender readers’ awareness Child transformed the well-established genres of captivity narratives and histories of settlement and Indian wars, in the process promulgating several ideas that now feature among the concepts that define environmental justice. By apprehending her First Settlers of New England within a matrix of Indian tales, we can appreciate how this volume deserves particular attention not only as children’s literature or environmental literature, but as a foundational early national and antebellum text for both children and adults.
Journal Article