5243.900 Women's Writing: 19th Century American Women Writers

Melissa Homestead

n the past 25 years, the study of 19th-century American women's writing has been transformed from a feminist recovery project on the margins of 19th-century American literary studies to a fully-developed and sometimes contentious scholarly field. Among the questions scholars ask: To what extent do women's text constitute a separate literary tradition? How should modern readers judge the value of texts and decide which ones are worthy of recovery? Should gender be the primary category of analysis for women's texts, or are race, class, and sexuality equally or more important? Rather than advancing one theoretical perspective in these debates, this class will broadly survey both texts and critical perspectives, preparing students to be informed readers, scholars, and teachers. Our readings will all be texts currently available in print in modern editions, covering a variety of genres, including fiction, autobiography and other non-fiction, poetry, and drama, and the authors who produced these texts represent the racial, class, and regional diversity of 19th-century American literary culture.

Each student will be required to produce a book review of a modern critical book in the field, a selective annotated bibliography of modern criticism of one of the authors whose works we will be reading, and a 10 to 15 page final paper. I strongly encourage interested students to propose their final papers for presentation at the second national conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, which will be held in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2003.

Our primary texts will include (subject to modification):

Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie (novel)
Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (non-fiction book)
Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie, Fashion (drama)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred, a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (novel)
Harriet Wilson, Our Nig (autobiographical novel)
Augusta Jane Evans, Macaria (novel)
Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes (autobiography)
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Silent Partner (novel)
Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (novel)
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (novel)
Selections from Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets (an anthology edited by Paula Bernat Bennett)
Short prose works available in modern anthologies by writers such as Eliza Leslie, Lydia Maria Child, Maria Stewart, Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Rose Terry Cooke, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zitkala Sa, and Sui Sin Far