A pioneering introduction to the oppositional, referential techniques Woolson developed to enter contested nineteenth-century political conversations about monetary policy, post-Reconstruction legal decisions, racial justice, women’s rights, religious hypocrisy, environmental destruction, and destabilizing political developments.

As these pieces demonstrate, Woolson offered keen observations on the issues she cared most deeply about, namely the cultural and political transformation of the United States in the wake of the Civil War, the status of women writers and artists in the nineteenth century, and the growing implications of nationalism and imperialism." "This collection features selections from each of the three distinct periods of Woolson's career and includes a chronology of her life and travels. Focusing primarily on Woolson's short stories, editors Victoria Brehm and Sharon L. Dean also include a representative letter, poem, and travel sketch for each section."--BOOK JACKET.

The Blackwell Companion to American Regional Literature is the most comprehensive resource yet published for study of this popular field. The most inclusive survey yet published of American regional literature. Represents a wide variety of theoretical and historical approaches. Surveys the literature of specific regions from California to New England and from Alaska to Hawaii. Discusses authors and groups who have been important in defining regional American literature.

"These essays explore topics crucial to understanding the period's literature and suggest new directions for scholarship. Together they constitute a collection that expands the available body of criticism about Woolson and her contemporaries. This book is indispensable reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century women's fiction and travel writing."--Jacket.

These diverse essays recast the place of aesthetics in production & consumption of American literature. Contributors showcase the interpretive possibilities available to those who bring politics, culture, ideology, & conceptions of identity into their critiques, combining close readings of individual works & authors with theoretical discussions.

Before the Civil War, American writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe had established authorship as a respectable profession for women. But though they had written some of the most popular and influential novels of the century, they accepted the taboo against female writers, regarding themselves as educators and businesswomen. During and after the Civil War, some women writers began to challenge this view, seeing themselves as artists writing for themselves and for posterity. Writing for Immortality studies the lives and works of four prominent members of the first generation of American women who strived for recognition as serious literary artists: Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. Combining literary criticism and cultural history, Anne E. Boyd examines how these authors negotiated the masculine connotation of "artist," imagining a space for themselves in the literary pantheon. Redrawing the boundaries between male and female literary spheres, and between American and British literary traditions, Boyd shows how these writers rejected the didacticism of the previous generation of women writers and instead drew their inspiration from the most prominent "literary" writers of their day: Emerson, James, Barrett Browning, and Eliot. Placing the works and experiences of Alcott, Phelps, Stoddard, and Woolson within contemporary discussions about "genius" and the "American artist," Boyd reaches a sobering conclusion. Although these women were encouraged by the democratic ideals implicit in such concepts, they were equally discouraged by lingering prejudices about their applicability to women.