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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... nature , the historical mind found it by merging with history . Elizabeth Peabody , the most theoretical of the women historians , spoke for many in express- ing a preference for history , the domain of the social , over nature , the do ...
... nature , superstition debases it " ( 1:91 ) . The study of Athenian Greece involved a critique of esthetics and es- theticism . Nobody doubted that under the guise of their many divinities the Greeks worshipped beauty , and sternly ...
... nature of Ca- tholicism . Stowe was certainly historically innovative in presenting this character as a proto - Luther , a " great reformer whose purpose seemed to meditate nothing less than the restoration of the Church of Italy to the ...
Contents
Women as Students of History II | 11 |
Maternal Historians Didactic Mothers | 29 |
History from the Divine Point of View | 46 |
Copyright | |
6 other sections not shown