From School to Salon Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry / Mary Loeffelholz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Loeffelholz, Mary, 1958-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American poetry.

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

Women and literature.

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

Physical Description:

1 online resource (288 p.) : 6 halftones. 2 line illus.

Place of Publication:

Princeton University Press, 2004. Princeton, N.J. :

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

With the transformation and expansion of the nineteenth-century American literary canon in the past two decades, the work of the era's American women poets has come to be widely anthologized. But scant scholarship has arisen to make full sense of it. From School to Salon responds to this glaring gap. Mary Loeffelholz presents the work of nineteenth-century women poets in the context of the history, culture, and politics of the times. She uses a series of case studies to discuss why the recovery of nineteenth-century women's poetry has been a process of anthologization without succeeding analysis. At the same time, she provides a much-needed account of the changing social contexts through which nineteenth-century American women became poets: initially by reading, reciting, writing, and publishing poetry in school, and later, by doing those same things in literary salons, institutions created by the high-culture movement of the day. Along the way, Loeffelholz provides detailed analyses of the poetry, much of which has received little or no recent critical attention. She focuses on the works of a remarkably diverse array of poets, including Lucretia Maria Davidson, Lydia Sigourney, Maria Lowell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Emily Dickinson, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Annie Fields. Impeccably researched and gracefully written, From School to Salon moves the study of nineteenth-century women's poetry to a new and momentous level.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Objects of Recovery

I. Prodigy and Teacher; or, Poetry in the Domestic-Tutelary Complex

Chapter One Who Killed Lucretia Davidson?

Chapter Two The School of Lydia Sigourney

II. Lessons of the Sphinx: Poetry and Cultural Capital in Abolition and Reconstruction

Chapter Three Poetry, Slavery, Personification: Maria Lowell’s “Africa”

Chapter Four A Difference in the Vernacular: The Reconstruction Poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

III. The Conquest of Autonomy

Chapter Five “Plied from Nought to Nought”: Helen Hunt Jackson and the Field of Emily Dickinson’s Refusals

Chapter Six Metropolitan Pastoral: The Salon Poetry of Annie Fields

Conclusion: The Sentiments of Recovery: Adrienne Rich and Nineteenth-Century Women’s Culture

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [209]-265) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780691231105

0691231109

OCLC:

1249473709