Soft Canons

American Women Writers

Karen L. Kilcup

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN:
  9780877456896
  9780877456889
• eBook ISBN:
  9781587292873
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Recognizing that masculine literary tradition can include marginalized male writers as well as canonized female writers and that traditions themselves change over time, the essays in this insightful and coherent collection also explore the investment of the writers, as well as ninetieth- and twentieth-century readers, in canon creation. As it reconstructs conversations between these earlier authors and initiates new dialogues for today's readers, Soft Canons offers provocative reconceptualizations of American literary and cultural history.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• The Conversation of “The Whole Family”: Gender, Politics, and Aesthetics in Literary Tradition karen l. kilcup
• Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick: A Dialogue on Race, Culture, and Gender susanne opfermann
• Reconstructing Literary Genealogies: Frances E. W. Harper’s and William Dean Howells’s Race Novels m. giulia fabi
• Was Tom White? Stowe’s Dred and Twain’s "Pudd’nhead Wilson" judie newman
• Shaped by Readers: The Slave Narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs stephen matterson
• Body Politics and the Body Politic in William Wells Brown’s "Clotel" and Harriet Wilson’s "Our Nig" r. j. ellis
• Wild Semantics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Feminization of Edgar Allan Poe’s Arabesque Aesthetics gabriele rippl
• Deepening Hues to Local Color: George Washington Cable and Sarah Barnwell Elliott aranzazu usandizaga
• "Sister Carrie" and "The Awakening": The Clothed, the Unclothed, and the Woman Undone janet beer
• Ladies Prefer Bonds: Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and the Money Novel claire preston
• Mining the West: Bret Harte and Mary Hallock Foote janet floyd
• My Banker and I Can Afford to Laugh! Class and Gender in Fanny Fern and Nathaniel Hawthorne alison m. j. easton
• Body/Rituals: The (Homo)Erotics of Death in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Terry Cooke, and Edgar Allan Poe ralph j. poole
• The Five Million Women of My Race: Negotiations of Gender in W. E. B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper hanna wallinger
• Woman Thinking: Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the American Scholar lindsey traub
• How Conscious Could Consciousness Grow? Emily Dickinson and William James susan manning
• Contributors
• Index