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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... Sigourney accompanies these com- parisons with the lament that the Indians - equally valiant , noble , eloquent as these historical figures - are doomed to extinction without a history . Sometimes she interrupts the Native American ...
... Sigourney begins . this poem with a brief mention of a much - written - about incident of the Revolution , the Wyoming Valley massacre of 1778 , when an alliance of Tory Pennsylvanians and Indians slaughtered emigrant patriot settlers ...
... Sigourney , who had produced a fanciful local history early in her career , the Sketch of Connecticut , Forty Years Since ( 1824 ) . Headed by an epigraph from Scott- " Land of my sires ! -What mortal hand / Can e'er untie the filial ...
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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