American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860

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Rutgers University Press, 1995 - Biography & Autobiography - 307 pages

Just 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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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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About the author (1995)

Nina Baym was born Nina Zippin in Princeton, New Jersey on June 14, 1936. She received a bachelor's degree from Cornell University, a master's degree from Radcliffe College, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She joined the faculty of the University of Illinois-Champaign in 1963 and taught English there until her retirement in 2004. She wrote several books including Shape of Hawthorne's Career; The Scarlet Letter: A Reading; Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870; Women Writers of the American West, 1832-1927; and Feminism and American Literary History. She also served as general editor of several editions of The Norton Anthology of American Literature. She died from complications of dementia on June 15, 2018 at the age of 82.

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