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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... kind of book was needed : por- table , inexpensive , pithier . Early women teachers , who prepared classroom compilations and commentary for their students , quickly saw the possi- bilities for wider circulation of this kind of work ...
... kind of Oedipal fan- tasy this might be is not clearly apparent . Conservative plots , of which Grace Seymour is the most fully devel- oped example , are not so sanguine . The paternal figure , much more vil- lainous than in the liberal ...
... kind of history that had never yet been written , a history of the ordinary rather than the exceptional . This , com- bined with her archival recovery work , makes Ellet significantly different from the historians of women who worked ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Maternal Historians Didactic Mothers | 29 |
History from the Divine Point of View | 46 |
Copyright | |
9 other sections not shown