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"American fiction Women authors History and criticism."
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The Genius of Democracy
In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, ideas of genius did more than define artistic and intellectual originality. They also provided a means for conceptualizing women's participation in a democracy that marginalized them. Widely distributed across print media but reaching their fullest development in literary fiction, tropes of female genius figured types of subjectivity and forms of collective experience that were capable of overcoming the existing constraints on political life. The connections between genius, gender, and citizenship were important not only to contests over such practical goals as women's suffrage but also to those over national membership, cultural identity, and means of political transformation more generally. InThe Genius of DemocracyVictoria Olwell uncovers the political uses of genius, challenging our dominant narratives of gendered citizenship. She shows how American fiction catalyzed political models of female genius, especially in the work of Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Mary Hunter Austin, Jessie Fauset, and Gertrude Stein. From an American Romanticism that saw genius as the ability to mediate individual desire and collective purpose to later scientific paradigms that understood it as a pathological individual deviation that nevertheless produced cultural progress, ideas of genius provided a rich language for contests over women's citizenship. Feminist narratives of female genius projected desires for a modern public life open to new participants and new kinds of collaboration, even as philosophical and scientific ideas of intelligence and creativity could often disclose troubling and more regressive dimensions. Elucidating how ideas of genius facilitated debates about political agency, gendered identity, the nature of consciousness, intellectual property, race, and national culture, Olwell reveals oppositional ways of imagining women's citizenship, ways that were critical of the conceptual limits of American democracy as usual.
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Southern Women Novelists and the Civil War
During and after the Civil War, southern women played a
critical role in shaping the South’s evolving collective
memory by penning journals and diaries, historical accounts,
memoirs, and literary interpretations of the war. While a few of
these writings—most notably Mary Chesnut’s diaries
and Margaret Mitchell’s novel,
Gone with the Wind —have been studied in depth by
numerous scholars, until now there has been no comprehensive
examination of Civil War novels by southern women. In this
welcome study, Sharon Talley explores works by fifteen such
writers, illuminating the role that southern women played in
fashioning cultural identity in the region. Beginning with
Augusta Jane Evans’s Macaria and Sallie Rochester
Ford’s
Raids and Romance of Morgan and His Men , which were
published as the war still raged, Talley offers a chronological
consideration of the novels with informative introductions for
each time period. She examines Reconstruction works by Marion
Harland, Mary Ann Cruse, and Rebecca Harding Davis, novels of the
“Redeemed” South and the turn of the century by Mary
Noailles Murfree, Ellen Glasgow, and Mary Johnston, and
narratives by Evelyn Scott, Margaret Mitchell, and Caroline
Gordon from the Modern period that spanned the two World Wars.
Analysis of Margaret Walker’s
Jubilee (1966), the first critically acclaimed Civil War
novel by an African American woman of the South, as well as other
post–World War II works by Kaye Gibbons, Josephine
Humphreys, and Alice Randall, offers a fitting conclusion to
Talley’s study by addressing the inaccuracies in the
romantic myth of the Old South that
Gone with the Wind most famously engraved on the
nation’s consciousness. Informed by feminist,
poststructural, and cultural studies theory, Talley’s close
readings of these various novels ultimately refute the notion of
a monolithic interpretation of the Civil War, presenting instead
unique and diverse approaches to balancing “fact” and
“fiction” in the long period of artistic production
concerning this singular traumatic event in American history.
Sharon Talley, professor of English at Texas A&M
University–Corpus Christi, is the author of
Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death and
Student Companion to Herman Melville . Her articles have
appeared in
American Imago, Journal of Men’s Studies, and
Nineteenth-Century Prose.
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Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was perhaps the most prolific black female writer of her time. Between 1900 and 1904, writing mainly for Colored American Magazine, she published four novels, at least seven short stories, and numerous articles that often addressed the injustices and challenges facing African Americans in post-Civil War America. In Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream, Alisha Knight provides the first full-length critical analysis of Hopkins's work. Scholars have frequently situated Hopkins within the domestic, sentimental tradition of nineteenth-century women's writing, with some critics observing that aspects of her writing, particularly its emphasis on the self-made man, seem out of place within the domestic tradition. Knight argues that Hopkins used this often-dismissed theme to critique American society's ingrained racism and sexism. In her \"Famous Men\" and \"Famous Women\" series for Colored American Magazine, she constructed her own version of the success narrative by offering models of African American self-made men and women. Meanwhile, in her fiction, she depicted heroes who fail to achieve success or must leave the United States to do so. Hopkins risked and eventually lost her position at Colored American Magazine by challenging black male leaders, liberal white philanthropists, and white racists-and by conceiving a revolutionary treatment of the American Dream that placed her far ahead of her time. Hopkins is finally getting her due, and this clear-eyed analysis of her work will be a revelation to literary scholars, historians of African American history, and students of women's studies. Alisha Knight is an associate professor of English and American Studies at Washington College. Her published articles include \"Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard: Revisiting Pauline E. Hopkins, Booker T. Washington, and the Colored American Magazine,\" which appeared in American Periodicals.
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Opening acts : narrative beginnings in twentieth-century feminist fiction
\"In the beginning there was. the beginning. And with the beginning came the power to tell a story. Few book-length studies of narrative beginnings exist, and not one takes a feminist perspective. Opening Acts reveals the important role of beginnings as moments of discursive authority with power and agency that have been appropriated by writers from historically marginalized groups. Catherine Romagnolo argues for a critical awareness of how social identity plays a role in the strategic use and critical interpretation of narrative beginnings.The twentieth-century U.S. women writers whom Romagnolo studies--Edith Wharton, H.D., Toni Morrison, Julia Alvarez, and Amy Tan--have seized the power to disrupt conventional structures of authority and undermine historical master narratives of marriage, motherhood, U.S. nationhood, race, and citizenship. Using six of their novels as points of entry, Romagnolo illuminates the ways in which beginnings are potentially subversive, thereby disrupting the reinscription of hierarchically gendered and racialized conceptions of authorship and agency\"-- Provided by publisher.
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New Visions of Community in Contemporary American Fiction
In this engaging, optimistic close reading of five late twentieth-century novels by American women, Magali Cornier Michael illuminates the ways in which their authors engage with ideas of communal activism, common commitment, and social transformation. The fictions she examines imagine coalition building as a means of moving toward new forms of nonhierarchical justice; for ethnic cultures that, as a result of racist attitudes, have not been assimilated, power with each other rather than power over each other is a collective goal.Michael argues that much contemporary American fiction by women offers models of care and nurturing that move away from the private sphere toward the public and political. Specifically, texts by women from such racially marked ethnic groups as African American, Asian American, Native American, and Mexican American draw from the rich systems of thought, histories, and experiences of these hybrid cultures and thus offer feminist and ethical revisions of traditional concepts of community, coalition, subjectivity, and agency.Focusing on Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Michael shows that each writer emphasizes the positive, liberating effects of kinship and community. These hybrid versions of community, which draw from other-than-dominant culturally specific ideas and histories, have something to offer Americans as the United States moves into an increasingly diverse twenty-first century. Michael provides a rich lens through which to view both contemporary fiction and contemporary life.
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Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts
\"Washington writes supple and thoughtful prose and creatively integrates African and African-derived terminology, which never distract the reader. I consider Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts not only a brilliant study, but also a model to be emulated.\" -- Ousseynou B. Traore, William Patterson UniversityÀjé is a Yoruba word that signifies a spiritual power of vast potential, as well as the human beings who exercise that power. Although both men and women can have Àjé, its owners and controllers are women, the literal and cosmic Mothers who are revered as the gods of society. Because of its association with female power, its invisibility and profundity, Àjé is often misconstrued as witchcraft. However, as Teresa N. Washington points out in Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts, Àjé is central to the Yoruba ethos and cosmology. Not only does it underpin the concepts of creation and creativity, but as a force of justice and retribution, Àjé is essential to social harmony and balance. As Africans were forced into exile and enslavement, they took Àjé with them and continued its work of creating, destroying, harming, and healing in the New World.Washington seeks out Àjé's subversive power of creation and re-creation in a diverse range of Africana texts, from both men and women, from both oral and contemporary literature, and across space and time. She guides readers to an understanding of the symbolic, methodological, and spiritual issues that are central to important works by Africana writers but are rarely elucidated by Western criticism. She begins with an examination of the ancient forms of Àjé in Yoruba culture, which creates a framework for innovative readings of important works by Africana writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka, Jamaica Kincaid, and Ntozake Shange. This rich analysis will appeal to readers of
Africana literature, African religion and philosophy, feminist studies, and comparative literature.
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