American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860Just as she helped launch the rediscovery of literary texts by American women writers, Nina Baym now uncovers the work of history performed by over 150 writers in over 350 texts. Here she explores a world of important writing unknown even to most specialists. The novels, poems, plays, textbooks, and travel narratives written by women between 1790 and the Civil War defy current theories of women's writing that stress a female domain of the private, homebound, and emotional. History is inarguably public in its nature and these women wrote it. In doing so, they challenged the imaginative and intellectual boundaries that divided domestic and public worlds. They claimed on behalf of all women the rights to know and to speak about the world outside the home, as well as to circulate their knowledge and opinions among the public. Their work helped shape the enormous public interest in history characteristic of the antebellum nation, and ultimately to forge our national identity in the history of the world. Nina Baym deftly outlines the master narrative of history implied in women's writings of this period, and discusses in a completely revisioned context the emergence of women's history in public discourse.
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From inside the book
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... Century ( Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 1990 ) ; and Mary Kelley , Private Woman , Public Stage : Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth - Century America ( New York : Oxford University Press , 1984 ) . Neither general ...
... Century Europe ( Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press , 1974 ) ; White , The Content of the Form : Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation ( Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press , 1987 ) . Typically , women are not ...
... Century ( Phila- delphia : Lippincott , 1877 ) ; R.W.G. Vail , " Susanna Haswell Rowson , the Author of Charlotte Temple : A Bibliographical Study , " Proceedings of the American Anti- quarian Society 42 ( 1932 ) : 47-160 ; John B ...
Contents
Women as Students of History II | 11 |
Maternal Historians Didactic Mothers | 29 |
History from the Divine Point of View | 46 |
Copyright | |
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