Reclaiming authorship : literary women in America, 1850-1900 / Susan S. Williams.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Williams, Susan S.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

Women and literature--United States--History--19th century.

Women and literature.

Authorship.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (264 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

There was, in the nineteenth century, a distinction made between "writers" and "authors," Susan S. Williams notes, the former defined as those who composed primarily from mere experience or observation rather than from the unique genius or imagination of the latter. If women were more often cast as writers than authors by the literary establishment, there also emerged in magazines, advice books, fictional accounts, and letters a specific model of female authorship, one that valorized "natural" feminine traits such as observation and emphasis on detail, while also representing the distance between amateur writing and professional authorship. Attending to biographical and cultural contexts and offering fresh readings of literary works, Reclaiming Authorship focuses on the complex ways writers such as Maria S. Cummins, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Abigail Dodge, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson put this model of female authorship into practice. Williams shows how it sometimes intersected with prevailing notions of male authorship and sometimes diverged from them, and how it is often precisely those moments of divergence when authorship was reclaimed by women. The current trend to examine "women writers" rather than "authors" marks a full rotation of the circle, and "writers" can indeed be the more capacious term, embracing producers of everything from letters and diaries to published books. Yet certain nineteenth-century women made particular efforts to claim the title "author," Williams demonstrates, and we miss something of significance by ignoring their efforts.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Preface

1. Defining Female Authorship

2. Writing in and out of the Home: Parlor Culture and Authorship

3. Authorizing Reception: Maria Cummins and The Lamplighter

4. Revising Romance: Louisa May Alcott, Hawthorne, and the Civil War

5. Contractual Authorship: Elizabeth Keckley and Mary Abigail Dodge

6. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Ethical Authorship

7. Epilogue: Amateurs and Professionals in Woolson and James

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [229]-243) and index.

ISBN:

0-8122-0389-5

OCLC:

859161057