Explore the vast range of titles available.

Lydia Maria Child presents the life of the dynamic nineteenth-century writer who, through her pen and at great personal cost to her literary career, spoke out for those silenced in society -- slaves, Native Americans, women, and the poor. At the dawn of the 1830s, Lydia Maria Child was a celebrated author, known for her popular domestic handbook, The Frugal Housewife, and Hobomok, a novel of American Indian life. In 1833, with the publication of her controversial Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, Child's life changed dramatically from literary figure to antislavery activist. Her Appeal helped ignite the abolitionist movement, and several antislavery leaders -- including Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner -- credited it with converting them to the cause. An inspirational look at an extraordinary woman, Lydia Maria Child is the story of how one person fought for the basic human right of freedom -- for all. Oxford Portraits are informative and insightful biographies of people whose lives shaped their times and continue to influence ours. Based on the most recent scholarship, they draw heavily on primary sources, including writings by and about their subjects. Each book is illustrated with a wealth of photographs, documents, memorabilia, framing the personality and achievements of its subject against the backdrop of history.

Considering the number of live and dead women who were worshipped in the Poe canon, it is unfathomable that no book has come out dealing with the subject of Poe and women, though there have been various essays, which the editors of and contributors to this volume acknowledge. In the world of Hawthorne criticism, John L. Idol Jr. and Melinda M. Ponder edited a collection of essays [Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1999)] focusing on the many women who inspired Hawthorne (among them his wife, Sophia; his sister-in-law Elizabeth Palmer Peabody; and Margaret Fuller) and those who \"borrowed\" from Hawthorne knowingly or inadvertently, in terms of themes, settings, and conflicts (such as Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edith Wharton). [...]these essays show how Poe's relationships with women and his presentation of women characters affect women writers and women artists and infiltrate the art they create. [...]Armiento is thorough and most interesting in showing how various critics of Poe's works overlap with Poe's prevalent themes, which necessitates an analysis of politics and women's growing activism. [...]women's scholarly essays focusing on Poe's characters' \"crisis of masculinity\" or Poe's stance on slavery are significant in this chapter as are critical interdisciplinary views of science, race, medicine, religion, philosophy, ecocriticism, literary style, and, more recently, disability studies.

Today, I find it hard to see the image of boys with hammers held high, determined to nail everything in sight, including a police officer, without superimposing images of outraged citizens in Washington, DC, brandishing fire extinguishers and flags. In both cases, the energy of those who would be seen and heard tramples on images of law and order, demands that hierarchies of power be overturned. Examining Holocaust narratives for children from a historical perspective, Rudin finds that while early texts are political and aimed at justifying the establishment of the State of Israel, texts written after 1980 are focused on personal stories and turn \"toward enhancing the survivors' emotional world as well as their relationship with their family members, presenting rich and elusive poetics rather than realism.\" The final essay in this volume, Margaret Mackey's \"The (Im)materialities of the Reading Space: The Story of Holly and Ivy,\" provides another case study, this one focused on the reader's own experience across multiple moments in history.

Lydia Maria Child's Juvenile Miscellany (1826-1835) acted as a primer on good and bad political revolutions. Child was eager to protect the legacy of the American Revolution while also rejecting violent revolt. Child's attitudes towards revolutions were influenced by race and American exceptionalism, which this article seeks to examine.

The Qur'an is the scripture of a quarter of the world's inhabitants, but remains little read outside of adherents. Modern engagements with it among writers in northern Europe and the Americas have been characterized by a discontinuous set of uses for it, often positioning it as a heterotopia. The book itself remains little explored except among specialist academics, but the history of meditations on it by prominent writers is one way into this crucial text.

In this thesis I argue that Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872) disrupts conventional narratives of the idealized maternal role in the Victorian era, “the angel in the house” by confronting and giving a voice to the often overlooked realities of maternal suffering. Rossetti accomplishes this by fostering the conversation regarding the challenges inherent in motherhood. Sing-Song has been dismissed by critics as inappropriate for its intended child audience. However, such assessments rely on outdated assumptions and fail to recognize the intention behind the poetry collection. The subtle coding of the rhymes for a maternal audience has largely been overlooked. Rossetti deliberately represents the psychological and emotional complexities of motherhood, offering a more realistic portrayal of the mental health challenges that may accompany the maternal experience. In turn, Sing-Song challenges the idealized mother figure of the Victorian era and represents a more nuanced understanding of motherhood.

Under the subtitle \"Some Honest Opinions at Random Respecting Their Authorial Merits, with Occasional Words of Personality,\" he wrote what Kenneth Silverman calls \"praise-blame\" essays that nearly always include descriptions of the writer's physical appearance.1 Overall, Poe surveys thirty-eight American writers, thirteen of whom are women (including Margaret Fuller, Caroline Kirkland, Lydia Maria Child, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick). Along with sketches, marginalia, and reviews, Poe also produced four comic tales-\"The Angel of the Odd,\" \"The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq,\" \"The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade,\" and \"Some Words with a Mummy\"-as well as an editorial narrative, \"Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House,\" while living with the Brennans. Whether creating a writerly persona that could help him psychologically and strategically negotiate the complex literary world of New York City (Peeples), epitomizing the underappreciated writer forced to perform hackwork to survive (Gruesser and Montgomery), or becoming after his death a model for bohemianism (Whitley), New York Poe warrants our attention and further study These three essays represent excellent starting points for renewed interest in this fascinating and near-final period of Poe's career.

Following Karcher's lead, our newly formed society seeks to spark a conversation centered on Child's immense contributions to an American literary tradition rooted in principles of social equality and their potential applicability to the social problems we face today. [...]this forum provides a discussion of Child's continuing relevance to the United States' social and political landscape and considers how this relevance may be incorporated into our pedagogies. In reflecting upon these matters, our contributors cover a variety of current topics, including race relations, immigration, prison reform, religious tolerance, environmental rights, women's equality, inclusivity in the classroom, recent adaptations of abolition politics, and the relevance of our historiographical approaches to all of these, demonstrating the wide scope of Child's work and legacy. Kilcup's and Hoeller's pieces provide focused investigations of Child's relevance to particular social justice issues, while Mills's and Fanuzzi's widen in scope to offer reflections on Child's conceptions of...

While the March sisters are bemoaning how \"dreadful to be poor\" and a \"Christmas without any presents\" (11) in the midst of Civil War, Linda Brent's chapter \"Christmas Festivities\" describes enslaved women's attempts to \"gladden the hearts of their little ones\" despite the slave auction that presages \"the Slaves' New Year's Day\" (Jacobs 118, 15). Alcott's autobiographical novel set the standard for a decidedly American, New England girlhood, but nineteenth-century black women authors would deploy sentiment and sensation in their autobiographical fictions for a different objective. In their hands, Alcott's tropes (with influence from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child) became powerful tools of resistance, shining the spotlight on \"little women\" who were not allowed a true or intact childhood; whose plot trajectories forked not between artistic spinsterhood and marriage, but who became adolescent mothers confronted with a choice for freedom with or without their children; whose domestic labors served others, toiling like the unaffectionately nicknamed Frado as \"Nig\" under the constant threat of a beating; and whose adventures abroad involved stowing away on a ship (Linda Brent) or gendered and racial passing on a train (Ellen Craft).

In his 1837 oration “The American Scholar,” Emerson demanded that, above all, […]