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American Blood: The Ends of the Family in American Literature, 1850-1900

Holly Jackson

American Blood foregrounds a culture-wide struggle over the definition and value of the family in the nineteenth-century United States. This study offers a new vision of the American ... More

American Blood foregrounds a culture-wide struggle over the definition and value of the family in the nineteenth-century United States. This study offers a new vision of the American novel in this tumultuous period, highlighting works that protest the overvaluation of kinship in American culture, depicting the domestic family as antagonistic to the political enterprise of the United States. Far from venerating the family as the nucleus of the nation, these novels imagine, even welcome, the decline of this institution and the social order it supports. Despite the founders’ concern that unseemly reverence for family relations might taint the new republic, the familial rhetoric of nationalism was deployed so energetically throughout the nineteenth century that reverence for the family came to seem like a core American value. Imaginative literature in this period retains an interest in the value of cutting blood ties, prizing the American dream of freedom from inherited identity. This study highlights works that criticize the expansion of the concept of family, viewing kinship as not only inadequate but dangerous in application to politics, suggesting that democratic citizenship should serve as the basis for coalitions across ascriptive differences. Six chapters chart the literary representation of the American family in relation to legal, scientific, literary, and political discourses from antebellum abolitionism through the Reconstruction suffrage debates, the burgeoning of feminism, and the “nadir” of post-Emancipation African American experience at the turn of the twentieth century.Less

Between the Lines: Literary Transnationalism and African American Poetics

Monique-Adelle Callahan

This book maintains that the poetic texts examined here constitute an active process of composing history; they are not simply historicized. They give name to the nation and compose of a historical ... More

This book maintains that the poetic texts examined here constitute an active process of composing history; they are not simply historicized. They give name to the nation and compose of a historical narrative for its denizens. They are literary artifacts, bearing the vestiges of the past while provoking new interpretations. As visionaries and composers of New World history, Frances Harper, Cristina Ayala and Auta de Souza are a part of a larger process of conceptualizing freedom in the New World. Frances Harper’s trans-hemispheric poetic gestures delimit the scope of this project. By exemplifying the kind of readings that can evolve from following one poet’s trans-hemispheric allusions and articulate the fundamentally transnational aspect of African American literature in the United States, and inspire more re-evaluations of trans-hemispheric literary currents across national boundaries in afrodescendente literatures. The spectre of race and its particular performances of gender identities among afrodescendente peoples in the New World, informs these poetics but does not conform them to a monolithic body of national literature. Afrodescendente poetry in the Americas highlights the power of words to imagine new histories and new forms of identity. In their interplay, the poems tell us certain truths about how the concept of freedom can evolve. They say: “Freedom” cannot be understood as a byproduct of slavery’s abolition. They say: Freedom is a poetic process. They say: Freedom cannot just be legislated, it has to be written.Less

Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England

Susan Wiseman

What was the relationship between woman and politics in seventeenth century England? Responding to this question, Conspiracy and Virtue argues that theoretical exclusion of women from the political ... More

What was the relationship between woman and politics in seventeenth century England? Responding to this question, Conspiracy and Virtue argues that theoretical exclusion of women from the political sphere shaped their relation to it. Rather than producing silence, this exclusion generated rich, complex, and oblique political involvements which this study traces through the writings of both men and women. Pursuing this argument, Conspiracy and Virtue engages the main writings on women's relationship to the political sphere including debates on the public sphere and on contract theory. Writers and figures discussed include many authors who are not often studied together, such as Elizabeth Avery, Aphra Behn, Anne Bradstreet, Maragret Cavendish, Queen Christina of Sweden, Anne Halkett, Brilliana Harley, Lucy Hutchinson, John Milton, Elizabeth Poole, Sara Wight, and Henry Jessey.Less

Cornelia Sorabji: India's Pioneering Woman Lawyer

Suparna Gooptu

This book presents the biography of Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954), the first woman to study law at Oxford. A Parsee and daughter of a converted Christian, Cornelia was among the early Indian women to ... More

This book presents the biography of Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954), the first woman to study law at Oxford. A Parsee and daughter of a converted Christian, Cornelia was among the early Indian women to practice at the Calcutta High Court. Appointed to a senior office under the British Indian government, she championed the cause of opening up the legal profession to women much before they were formally allowed to plead before the courts of law. Her story as a pioneer remains largely untold till date. Characterized by conservatism, individualism, and feelings against Indian nationalism, Cornelia was one of the early woman legal professionals in India who played a pivotal role in protecting the interests of the purdahnashins.Less

Curious Subjects: Women and the Trials of Realism

Hilary M. Schor

Curious Subjects focuses on the relationship between women, curiosity, and the rise of the novel, using the lenses of scientific, legal, and “fictional” curiosity to examine the changing ... More

Curious Subjects focuses on the relationship between women, curiosity, and the rise of the novel, using the lenses of scientific, legal, and “fictional” curiosity to examine the changing definitions of the subject within these various discourses. Texts range from eighteenth-century fiction to classic Victorian “heroine texts,” to contemporary revisions of realist forms, with an emphasis on the always-doubled and duplicitous nature of both female curiosity and the realist project. The book rethinks the question of female knowledge from within the form of the novel, using not just the metaphor but the history of curiosity after the Enlightenment. It begins with the wanderings of curiosity from medieval pilgrims’ relics to private collections to public museums, and interweaves this history with the origins of the modern legal subject, arguing that the most intriguing version of that subject is the curious heroine. So, from the beginning of the book, the rise of the novel, the evolution of curiosity, and the enfranchisement of women are deeply intertwined. Central literary figures include Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Henry James, with examples ranging from Paradise Lost and Clarissa to The Sadeian Woman and The Handmaid’s Tale, from Freud to Bluebeard’s wife.Less

Early Feminists of Colonial India: Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

Bharati Ray

This book is a story of two outstanding Bengali women fighting for a cause, so similar and yet so strikingly different at multiple levels. It presents a historical evaluation of Sarala Devi ... More

This book is a story of two outstanding Bengali women fighting for a cause, so similar and yet so strikingly different at multiple levels. It presents a historical evaluation of Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. It specifically determines the similarities and differences in the ideas and activities of these women from two different communities in colonial Bengal, Hindu-Brahmo and Muslim, and thus also sheds some light on contemporary Hindu and Muslim societies, their patterns of change during the colonial encounter, and the emergence among both the communities of a new generation of women. It concentrates on their concern and work around women’s issues. It first introduces the lives of Sarala and Rokeya. It then investigates the steps Sarala and Rokeya advocated or adopted to enhance the lives of women. It concludes by addressing how their contemporaries viewed Sarala and Rokeya, and how are they regarded today.Less

Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman: A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought

Esha Niyogi De

Drawing lessons from the intersection of literature, photography, cinema, television, dance-drama, and ethnography, this book presents a unique analysis of Indian activist thought spread over two ... More

Drawing lessons from the intersection of literature, photography, cinema, television, dance-drama, and ethnography, this book presents a unique analysis of Indian activist thought spread over two centuries. It discusses two presuppositions of liberal individualism: personal autonomy and ethical autonomy. Besides, it argues that the ‘individual’ has been creatively indigenized in modern non-Western cultures: thinkers attentive to gender in postcolonial cultures embrace selected ethical premises of the Enlightenment and its human rights discourse while they refuse possessive individualism. Debating influential schools of postcolonial and transnational studies, the chapter provides radical argument through a rich tapestry of gender portrayals drawn from two moments of modern Indian thought: the rise of humanism in the colony and the growth of new individualism in contemporary liberalized India. From autobiographical texts by nineteenth century Bengali prostitutes, point-of-view photography, as well as women-centred dance-dramas and essays by Rabindranath Tagore to representation of Tagore's works on mainstream television, video, and stage; feminist cinema, choreography and performance by Aparna Sen and Manjusri Chaki-Sircar respectively—the book makes use of such and much more to creatively engage with empire, media, and gender.Less

Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture

Jill Rappoport

Altruism and self-assertiveness went hand in hand for Victorian women. During a period when most lacked property rights and professional opportunities, gift transactions allowed them to enter into ... More

Altruism and self-assertiveness went hand in hand for Victorian women. During a period when most lacked property rights and professional opportunities, gift transactions allowed them to enter into economic negotiations of power as volatile and potentially profitable as those within the market systems that so frequently excluded or exploited them. They made presents of holiday books and homemade jams, transformed inheritances into intimate and aggressive bequests, and, in both prose and practice, offered up their own bodies in sacrifice. Far more than selfless acts of charity or sure signs of their suitability for marriage, such gifts radically reconstructed women’s personal relationships and public activism in the nineteenth century. Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women’s giving from the 1820s to World War I. Attending to the dynamic action and reaction of gift exchange in fiction and poetry by Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti as well as in literary annuals, Salvation Army periodicals, and political pamphlets, Rappoport demonstrates how female authors and fictional protagonists alike mobilized networks outside marriage and the market. Through giving, women redefined the primary allegiances of their everyday lives, forged public coalitions, and advanced campaigns for abolition, slum reform, eugenics, and suffrage.Less

Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandal of Female Networks in Film and Literature

Ned Schantz

For over two hundred years of narrative culture, when female characters try to get together, crazy things happen. Indeed, the greater the means at women’s disposal, the more severe and twisted is the ... More

For over two hundred years of narrative culture, when female characters try to get together, crazy things happen. Indeed, the greater the means at women’s disposal, the more severe and twisted is the anxious reaction. But behind this broad anxiety lurks a powerful ideal of sympathetic and strategic female networks, an ideal that takes its intimate shape from the expectations of communications media, and that underwrites the very culture that would deny it. The book examines novelistic culture from the British novel to Hollywood film as a series of responses to the threat and promise of female networks. In texts from Clarissa, Emma, and The Portrait of a Lady to Sorry, Wrong Number, Vertigo, and You’ve Got Mail, it argues that a recurring gothic nightmare haunts plots of courtship and marriage, and that the concept of female networks illuminates the exits, for culture and criticism alike. And while this study must of necessity visit an uncanny realm of lost messages and false suitors, telepathy and artificial intelligence, locked rooms and time-traveling stalkers, these occult concerns only confirm the power at stake in the most basic modes of female communication, in gossip, letters, and phones.Less

Inside India

Halidé Edib

Mushirul Hasan (ed.)

First published in 1937, this book presents the author's personal account of India. The author, a Turkish writer and novelist, visited the region in 1935 and gained insights into the history and ... More

First published in 1937, this book presents the author's personal account of India. The author, a Turkish writer and novelist, visited the region in 1935 and gained insights into the history and sociology of the country. Based on her experiences, Halide Edib documents significant contemporary events which shaped the history of India at the time, including the Hindu-Muslim separatism and the freedom movement led by Mahatma Gandhi. Her work is by far the most eloquent account of Indian society and politics in the 1930s. Here she details her travel to several regions such as Aligarh, Lahore, Calcutta, Peshawar, Lucknow, Bombay, and Hyderabad, as well as her meetings with many people from different walks of life. She takes a look at Indian nationalism, identifies its strengths and weaknesses, describes its encounters with colonialism, and analyses the rising tide of Muslim nationalism. With scholarly finesse, she reveals the Indian personality of Muslims in India and shows a favourable disposition towards the perspective of the Congress Muslims.Less

Intimate Class Acts: Friendship and Desire in Indian and Pakistani Women's Fiction

Maryam Mirza

Intimate Class Acts is an interdisciplinary study of ten anglophone novels by women writers from India and Pakistan that grapple with the fascinating theme of emotional and physical intimacy between ... More

Intimate Class Acts is an interdisciplinary study of ten anglophone novels by women writers from India and Pakistan that grapple with the fascinating theme of emotional and physical intimacy between the haves and the have-nots in the Indian subcontinent. The novels examined include well-known texts, notably Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man, as well as works that have so far drawn limited critical attention, such as Moni Mohsin’s The End of Innocence and Brinda Charry’s The Hottest Day of the Year. The intimate relationships explored in the book include friendship between women during childhood and in the adult world, as well as heterosexual romance and desire. The book is a significant contribution to the still-nascent literary criticism of anglophone South Asian literature through the lens of class. It brings to the fore how material inequality intersects with other forms of social stratification, notably, gender and caste, to determine the complexion and longevity of intimate human relationships. It illustrates not only the tenuousness of cross-class intimacy, as depicted in works of fiction, but also its subversive possibilities. Moreover, the study demonstrates that while the English-language novel of the region can be ‘elitist’ and politically conservative, it can also produce nuanced narratives centred on the socio-economic subaltern’s voice, agency, and sensibility.Less

Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature

Lesel Dawson

The discourse of love, which is subjective, private, and instinctive, is also culturally constructed, public, and learned; it emphasizes the way in which the expression of reflexive feelings is bound ... More

The discourse of love, which is subjective, private, and instinctive, is also culturally constructed, public, and learned; it emphasizes the way in which the expression of reflexive feelings is bound up in wider historical narratives about bodies and interiority. In early modern medical texts, intense unfulfilled erotic desire is held to be a real and virulent disease: it is classified as a species of melancholy, with physical aetiologies and cures. This book analyses literary representations of lovesickness in relation to medical ideas about desire and wider questions about gender and identity, exploring the different ways that desire is believed to take root in the body, how gender roles are encoded and contested in courtship, and the psychic pains and pleasures of frustrated passion. It considers the relationship between women's lovesickness and other female maladies (such as hysteria and green sickness), and asks whether women can suffer from intellectual forms of melancholy generally thought to be exclusively male. It also examines the ways in which Neoplatonism offers an alternative construction of love to that found in natural philosophy, inverting much of the medical advice for what is held to be healthy in romantic love and promoting a different hierarchical relationship between the sexes. Finally, this study considers how anxieties concerning love's ability to emasculate the male lover emerge indirectly in remedies for lovesickness, illuminating ideas about masculinity as well as some of the psychic contradictions of erotic desire. Authors considered include: Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Middleton, John Ford, and William Davenant.Less

Madam Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation 1712-1812

Emma Major

Madam Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation, 1712–1812 explores the complex and fascinating relationship between women, Protestantism, and nationhood. Opening with a history of Britannia, ... More

Madam Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation, 1712–1812 explores the complex and fascinating relationship between women, Protestantism, and nationhood. Opening with a history of Britannia, this book argues that Britannia becomes increasingly popular as a national emblem from 1688 onwards. Over the eighteenth century, depictions of Britannia become exemplary as well as emblematic, her behaviour to be imitated as well as admired. Britannia takes life during the eighteenth century, stepping out of iconic representation on coins, out of the pages of James Thomson’s poetry, down from the stage of David Mallett’s plays, the frames of Francis Hayman and William Hogarth’s paintings, and John Flaxman’s monuments, to enter people’s lives as an identity to be experienced. One of the key strands explored in this book is Britannia’s relationship to female personifications of the Church of England, which themselves often drew on key Protestant Queens such as Elizabeth I and Anne. During the eighteenth century, Britannia also gained cultural status by being a female figure of nationhood at a time when Enlightenment historians developed conjectural histories that placed women at the centre of civilisation. Women’s religion, conversation, and social practice thus had a new resonance in this new, self-consciously civilised age. In this book, Emma Major looks at how narratives of faith, national identity, and civilisation allowed women such as Elizabeth Burnet, Elizabeth Montagu, Catherine Talbot, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Hannah More to see themselves as active agents in the shaping of the nation.Less

Mothering India: Women's Fiction in English Shaping Cultural History (1890-1947)

Susmita Roye

Mothering India concentrates on early Indian women’s fiction, not only evaluating their contribution to the rise of Indian Writing in English (IWE), but also exploring how they reassessed and ... More

Mothering India concentrates on early Indian women’s fiction, not only evaluating their contribution to the rise of Indian Writing in English (IWE), but also exploring how they reassessed and challenged stereotypes about Indian womanhood, thereby partaking in the larger debate about social reform legislations relating to women’s rights in British India. Early women’s writings are of immense archival significance by virtue of the time period they were conceived in. In wielding their pens, these trend-setting women writers (such as Krupa Satthianadhan, Shevantibai Nikambe, Cornelia Sorabji, Nalini Turkhud, among others) stepped into the literary landscape as ‘speaking subjects,’ refusing to remain confined into the passivity of ‘spoken-of objects.’ In focusing on the literary contribution of pioneering Indian women writers, this book also endeavours to explore their contribution to the formation of the image of their nation and womanhood. Some of the complex questions this book tackles are: Particularly when India was forming a vague idea of her nationhood and was getting increasingly portrayed in terms of femaleness (via the figure of an enchained ‘Mother India’), what role did women and their literary endeavours play in shaping both their nation and their femininity/feminism? How and how far did these pioneering authors use fiction as a tool of protest against and as resistance to the Raj and/or native patriarchy, and also to express their gender-based solidarity? How do they view and review the stereotypes about their fellow women, and thereby ‘mother’ India by redefining her image? Without studying women’s perspective in the movement for women’s rights (as expressed in their literature) and their role in ‘mothering India’, our knowledge and understanding of those issues are far from holistic. A detailed study of these largely understudied, sadly forgotten and/or deliberately overlooked ‘mothers’ of IWE is long overdue and this book aims to redress that critical oversight.Less

Networking the Nation: British and American Women's Poetry and Italy, 1840–1870

Alison Chapman

This book uncovers the British and American expatriate community in Italy, and especially Florence, in the decades leading up the Unification of Italy (the Risorgimento). The women poets who lived in ... More

This book uncovers the British and American expatriate community in Italy, and especially Florence, in the decades leading up the Unification of Italy (the Risorgimento). The women poets who lived in Italy and campaigned for Italian independence through their diverse writing (including poetry, journalism, reviews, serial fiction, and travel writing), as well as in their salons and their spiritualist experiments, strove to reconfigure women’s poetry into an active agent of public, political change, despite the risk involved in challenging the conventional category of the ‘English Poetess’, and in supporting a foreign policy that often went against perceived British interests in Europe. Literary history has credited Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1857) with the transformation of women’s poetry in a more muscular, politicized epic. Through analysis of Barrett Browning and the other poets in her network, this book deepens and complicates the literary history of women’s poetry in Britain and America in the nineteenth century, by intimately connecting Barrett Browning’s radical new epic voice with the work of her fellow poets, including Isa Blagden, Elizabeth Kinney, Eliza Ogilvy, and Theodosia Garrow Trollope. All these poets published in ephemeral, serial print, and their periodical writing was part of their political poetics borrowed from Italian patriots that asserted agency, liberty, freedom, community, and action as integral to the Risorgimento. In particular the act of publication did not just establish their professional identity as expatriate writers, but also was invested in the concept of the very agency of transnational print itself to achieve political goals through a circuit of culture and action.Less

A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America

Janet Gallingani Casey

This book reconceptualizes American modernity by focusing on rurality and women. It challenges the notion of the city as the privileged site of modern experience, arguing that rurality—urbanity’s ... More

This book reconceptualizes American modernity by focusing on rurality and women. It challenges the notion of the city as the privileged site of modern experience, arguing that rurality—urbanity’s opposite, frequently associated with nostalgia and feminine sentimentality—was a fruitful geographic and psychic location for registering women’s perceptions of the modern. As its title implies, however, it is less about the empirical facts of farm life than about its abstractions—the idea of rurality, and the ways in which women were positioned, by themselves and others, in reference to it. Attending closely to language, images, and figurative connections, it demonstrates the theoretical importance of rurality to the imaginative construction of American modernity and modernism, and asserts that women had a special stake in that relation. To that end, it considers idea(l)s of women and rurality across a broad field of discourses and representational arenas, including social theory, periodical literature, literary criticism, photography, and, especially, women’s rural fiction (“low” and “high”). It engages such diverse subjects as eugenics, advertising, the literary prize culture of the 1920s, and the role of the camera in defining women as modern. It also relies on substantial archival research, and explores at length an underrecognized periodical, The Farmer’s Wife, which was the single nationally distributed farm periodical for women in the twentieth century. Ultimately, the book’s aim is to articulate an alternative mode of American modernism that had special meaning and appeal for women, and to show how that mode clearly responded to prevalent attitudes about agrarianism, modernity, and gender in the culture at large.Less

The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather & Edith Lewis

Melissa J. Homestead

This book tells for the first time the story of the central relationship of novelist Willa Cather’s life, her nearly forty-year partnership with Edith Lewis. Cather has been described as a ... More

This book tells for the first time the story of the central relationship of novelist Willa Cather’s life, her nearly forty-year partnership with Edith Lewis. Cather has been described as a distinguished artist who turned her back on the crass commercialism of the early twentieth century and as a deeply private woman who strove to hide her sexuality, and Lewis has often been identified as her secretary. However, Lewis was a successful professional woman who edited popular magazines and wrote advertising copy at a major advertising agency and who, behind the scenes, edited Cather’s fiction. Recognizing Lewis’s role in Cather’s creative process changes how we understand Cather as an artist, while recovering their domestic partnership (which they did not seek to hide) provides a fresh perspective on lesbian life in the early twentieth century. Homestead reconstructs Cather and Lewis’s life together in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, their travels to the American Southwest that formed the basis of Cather’s novels The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, their summers as part of an all-woman resort community on Grand Manan Island, and Lewis’s magazine and advertising work as a context for her editorial collaboration with Cather. Homestead tells a human story of two women who chose to live in partnership and also explains how the Cold War panic over homosexuality caused biographers and critics to make Lewis and her central role in Cather’s life vanish even as she lived on alone for twenty-five years after her partner’s death.Less

Pamela Hansford Johnson: A Writing Life

Deirdre David

This literary biography traces the life of Pamela Hansford Johnson from her birth in a theatrical family to her death as the widow of C.P. Snow. A prolific writer, she published almost thirty novels, ... More

This literary biography traces the life of Pamela Hansford Johnson from her birth in a theatrical family to her death as the widow of C.P. Snow. A prolific writer, she published almost thirty novels, reviewed fiction for major newspapers, and made regular appearances on BBC cultural programmes. She lived through tumultuous changes in British life—1930s political unrest, World War 2, and postwar austerity: social changes that form the background for her fiction. Persuaded by her first love, Dylan Thomas, to abandon writing poetry for writing fiction about her life in South London, she devoted herself to restoring the traditions of social and psychological realism in the English novel at a time when the modernist experimentation of Woolf and Joyce prevailed. Hers was a courageous writing life.Less

Reading Early Modern Women's Writing

Paul Salzman

This book contains an account of writing by women from the mid 16th century through to 1700. It also traces the way a representative sample of that writing was published, circulated in manuscript, ... More

This book contains an account of writing by women from the mid 16th century through to 1700. It also traces the way a representative sample of that writing was published, circulated in manuscript, read, anthologised, reprinted, and discussed from the time it was produced through to the present day. Salzman's study covers an enormous range of women from all areas of early modern society, and it covers examples of the many and varied genres produced by these women, from plays to prophecies, diaries to poems, autobiographies to philosophy. As well as introducing the wealth of material produced by women in the early modern period, this book examines changing responses to what was written, tracing a history of reception and transmission that amounts to a cultural history of changing taste.Less