Elizabeth Stoddard & the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture

ISBN-13: 9780415968348 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 216 str.

Lynn Mahoney

Opis

This book traces Stoddard's emergence as a writer in the 1850s, her conflict-ridden relationships with the writers associated with the genteel tradition, and her efforts to negotiate the boundaries of Victorian culture in the United States. While in many ways a critic of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, Stoddard remained in other ways an adherent; her work was not a rejection of bourgeois culture but a reworking of it, which suggests that bourgeois culture was not as monolithic as later critics believed. Recovering the richness and possibility that characterized early Victorian writing, this book examines the range of literary expression which had existed at mid-century, a period that boasts some of American literature's most iconoclastic voices.

Spis treści

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: Becoming Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard Chapter Two: Female Self-Expression in a Sentimental Age: The Pythoness and the Sentinels of Genteel Literature Chapter Three: I was not allowed to give myself-I was taken: Passive Women and Feminized Men Chapter Four: Shall I dare tell the truth about women?: Reconstructing the Victorian Self Chapter Five: Rewriting Region: The Postbellum Celebration of New England Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

O autorze

Lynn Mahoney received her Ph.D. in U.S. History from Rutgers University. She is currently the Director of Liberal Studies and Academic Advising at Purchase College, SUNY, where she teaches history and women's studies.