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"Stoddard was, next to Melville and Hawthorne, the most strikingly original voice in the mid-nineteenth-century American novel, a voice . . . that ought to gain a more sympathetic and perceptive hearing in our time than in her own."—from the Introduction The centerpiece of this volume is The Morgesons (1862), one of the few outstanding feminist bildungsromanae of that century. Additional selections include arresting short stories and provocative journalistic essays/reviews, plus a number of letters and manuscript journals that have never before been published. The texts are fully edited and documented.

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 3,0, University of Bonn, language: English, abstract: A woman’s life in nineteenth-century American society was limited to the domestic sphere, or the household as well as church, and restricted with regard to current and future duties as mothers and wives. While young girls on the one hand need to learn how to fulfill their future duties as mothers and wives, their mothers and teachers on the other hand need to pass their knowledge regarding these duties on to their daughters. Certain gender roles served as the framework for women in society, mainly shaped by the Cult of True Womanhood. Other factors that influenced the role of women were the therewith connected virtues, which a woman was supposed to embody, as well as the common and well-known definition of a ‘True Woman’. With regard to the protagonist in The Morgesons the author “simply disregards the ‘cult of true womanhood’” (Weir 430). Autonomy with regard to women was rare, or even non-existing, and normally unwished-for, especially from the perspective of men, husbands or fathers, who expected every woman to simply take care of household and descendants.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.

This volume collects a series of writings exploring the notion, the experience and the representation of madness from different disciplinary perspectives and in different cultural contexts.

The author uses Thomas Robbins' 1820 edition of Mather's work to show how a Puritanical political sentiment prompted American Renaissance writers to address the implications of democracy. Hawthorne, Stoddard, and Stowe used Mather's work to discover the importance of democratic concepts and categori

A 2001 Companion providing an overview of the history of writing by women in nineteenth-century America.

In Heaven's Interpreters, Ashley Reed reveals how nineteenth-century American women writers transformed the public sphere by using the imaginative power of fiction to craft new models of religious identity and agency. Women writers of the antebellum period, Reed contends, embraced theological concepts to gain access to the literary sphere, challenging the notion that theological discourse was exclusively oppressive and served to deny women their own voice. Attending to modes of being and believing in works by Augusta Jane Evans, Harriet Jacobs, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Elizabeth Stoddard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner, Reed illuminates how these writers infused the secular space of fiction with religious ideas and debates, imagining new possibilities for women's individual agency and collective action. Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

An exploration of the works of Elizabeth Stoddard, an iconoclastic writer, whose literary output in mid-nineteenth century America affirms her as a significant and controversial voice for her time.