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 ...

Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people “dreaded scandal more than disease.”This is Newland Archer’s world as he prepares to marry the beautiful but conventional May Welland. But when the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a disastrous marriage, Archer falls deeply in love with her...

**"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Elizabeth Bishop represents a full-scale examination of Bishop's work—poetry, prose, and selected unpublished material—to reveal how personal loss becomes implicated in her vision of self as fluid and unfixed and, at the same time, how gender and sexual identity inform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...

Inter-American literary study is an exciting and fast-growing area of comparative scholarship. The Americas are tied together by a common historical heritage and by a history of social, political, economic, and cultural interaction.As a contribution to this field, this book brings together the literatures and literary histories of English and French Canada, the United States, Spanish America, the Caribbean, and Brazil. The periods focused on include the Colonial Period, the Ninetee...

Eudora Welty and Surrealism surveys Welty's fiction during the most productive period of her long writing life. The study shows how the 1930s witnessed surrealism's arrival in the United States largely through the products of its visual artists. Welty, a frequent traveler to New York City where the surrealists exhibited and a keen reader of magazines and newspapers that disseminated their work, absorbed and unconsciously appropriated surrealism's perspective in her writing. In fac...