Soft canons : American women writers and masculine tradition / edited by Karen L. Kilcup.

ISBN:

9781587292873

Title:

Author:

Kilcup, Karen L.

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

1 online resource (345 pages)

Contents:

The Conversation of "The Whole Family": Gender, Politics, and Aesthetics in Literary Tradition / Karen L. Kilcup -- Gendered Genealogies -- 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 -- Genre Matters -- 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 Barwell Elliott / Aranzazu Usandizaga -- Developing Dialogues -- 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 Hare 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 -- Transforming Traditions -- 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 Conscious Grow? Emily Dickinson and William James / Susan Manning.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Subject Term:

American literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism.

American literature -- Male authors -- History and criticism.

Women and literature -- United States -- History.

Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)

Authorship -- Sex differences.

Masculinity in literature.

Canon (Literature)

Men in literature.

Added Author:

Kilcup, Karen L.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

1999

Publication Information:

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
810.99287 21	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

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.

Author Notes

Karen Kilcup is professor of American literature, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Named a U.S. National Distinguished Teacher in 1987, she was recently the Davidson Eminent Scholar Chair at Florida International University. She is the editor of Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition (University of Iowa, 1999) and Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology and the author of Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

Kilcup's goal is unique: to bring together essays that create an alliance between the male and female traditions battling for literary supremacy by establishing dialogical rather than adversarial conditions. Kilcup (Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro) begins by explaining how literary criticism has severed the two traditions and made their integration more difficult. Therefore she also seeks to work toward a new and balanced model of criticism to repair fractures, one that will link male and female writers along aesthetic lines. Organized in four sections ("Gendered Genealogies," "Genre Matters," "Developing Dialogues," "Transforming Tradition"), the essays point to areas of similarity between the traditions--intersections and interactions of gender, sexuality, race, class, and social concern. For example, contributors deal with women mentors of male writers, marginalized male writers and canonized female writers, and how Chopin transgressed "masculine" boundaries to explore, with Dreiser, the US's anxiety about the role of women at the turn of the century. Janet Beer provides a rich discussion of the last in her contribution on two notorious novels, "Sister Carrie and The Awakening: The Clothed, the Unclothed, and the Woman Undone," and the theme reappears in Claire Preston's "Ladies Prefer Bonds: Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and the Money Novel." Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. J. A. Dompkowski; Canisius College