Reconsiders the centrality of a remarkable American writer of the ante- and postbellum periodsElizabeth Stoddard was a gifted writer of fiction, poetry, and journalism; successfully published within her own lifetime; esteemed by such writers as William Dean Howells and Nathaniel Hawthorne; and situated at the epicenter of New York’s literary world. Nonetheless, she has been almost excluded from literary memory and importance. This book seeks to understand ...

The Age of Innocence centers on one society couple's impending marriage and the introduction of a scandalous woman whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assumptions and mores of turn of the century New York society, it never devolves into an outright condemnation of the institution. In fact, Wharton considered this novel an "apology" for the earlier, more brutal and critical, "The House of Mirth". Not to be overlooked is the author's attention to detailin...

Lone Point is a sweet and wholesome Christian Romance by Grace Livingston Hill. RACHEL HAMMOND sat by the open window with her Bible on her knee. The muslin curtains did not blow with the breeze, for there was no breeze that hot morning in June. The air seemed breathless. Rachel had put her pretty room in order, finished all her little morning duties, and now had sat down for a quiet minute with her Bible before she began the day. ...

Margaret Atwood is an internationally renowned, highly versatile author whose work creatively explores what it means to be human through genres ranging from feminist fable to science fiction and Gothic romance.In this timely new study, Gina Wisker reassesses Atwood's entire fictional output to date, providing both original analysis and a lively overview of the criticism surrounding her work. 'Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction':• covers all of ...

**"Superb, scrupulously researched . . . a comprehensive narrative for understanding the changing reception of Little Women." —Gregory Eiselein, coeditor of The Louisa May Alcott EncyclopediaThe hit Broadway show of 1912. The lost film of 1919. Katharine Hepburn, as Jo, sliding down a banister in George Cukor's 1933 movie. Mark English's shimmering 1967 illustrations. Jo—this time played by Sutton Foster—belting "I'll be / astonishing" in the 2004 Broadway...

Elizabeth Bishop represents a full-scale examination of Bishop's work—poetry, prose, and selected unpublished material—to reveal how personal loss becomes implicated in her vision of self as fluid and unfixed and, at the same time, how gender and sexual identity inform the experience of loss in the act of writing. Susan McCabe argues that Bishop counters modernist claims for an autonomous art object and an impersonal artist; Bishop's writing never represents an escape into perfect...

Among the most important English novelists, Jane Austen is unusual because she is esteemed not only by academics but by the reading public. Her novels continue to sell well, and films adapted from her works enjoy strong box-officesuccess. The trajectory of Austen criticism is intriguing, especially when one compares it to that of other nineteenth-century English writers. At least partly because she was a woman in the early nineteenth century, she was longneglected by critics, hardly consid...

This book presents an alternative framework for reading nineteenth century women’s travel narratives by challenging the traditional paradigms which often limit women’s space in print culture. For the first time, through a comparative lens, a Latin American woman’s travel narrative is analyzed concomitantly with the narratives of a North American and a European writer. Contrary to the common assumption that Latin American women were powerless victims of imperialism, elite women had access t...

The virtuous Roman matron Lucretia killed herself in 509 b. C. Her death is considered the cause of the Roman revolt against the Tarquins and the mainspring of the passage from the monarchic to the republican age. It is a myth about private and public dimensions: it tells about woman and revolution. Its themes, permanent features and variations are infinite. The metamorphoses of Lucretia are innumerable. Nonetheless, she has always preserved her essence and profound meaning, thus confirmin...

This first biographical and literary assessment of Frances Newman highlights one of the most experimental writers of the Southern RenaissanceNovelist, translator, critic, and acerbic book reviewer Frances Newman (1883–1928) was praised by Virginia novelist James Branch Cabell and critic H. L. Mencken. Her experimental novels The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926) and Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers (1928), have recently begun to receive serious cr...

In this pathbreaking work of scholarship, Laura Doyle reveals the central, formative role of race in the development of a transnational, English-language literature over three centuries. Identifying a recurring freedom plot organized around an Atlantic Ocean crossing, Doyle shows how this plot structures the texts of both African-Atlantic and Anglo-Atlantic writers and how it takes shape by way of submerged intertextual exchanges between the two traditions. For Anglo-Atlantic writers, Doyl...