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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... novels expressed by critics in these early years seems to me to involve less a fear of fiction's radicalizing potential than the oppo- site . ( But for a view of early novels as subversive radical documents , at least in potential , see ...
... novel productions , as , for example , Anna L. Snelling's pro - Harrison novel about the War of 1812 , Kabaosa ; or , The Warriors of the West ( 1842 ) , seem to have been addressed to immediate political affairs . But all historical novels ...
... novels may be seen as more radical than the liberal novels , because the liberals obvi- ously endorse a rapprochement between the United States and England , while the conservatives imply that the ideology of the republic would be ...
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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