Examines the intersection of male and female spheres in American literature
Although they wrote in the same historical milieu as their male counterparts, women writers of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries have generally been "ghettoized" by critics into a separate canonical sphere. These original essays argue in favor of reconciling male and female writers, both historically and in the context of classroom teaching.While some of the essays pair up female and male authors who write in a similar style or with similar concerns, others address social issues shared by both men and women, including class tensions, economic problems, and the Civil War experience. Rather than privileging particular genres or certain well-known writers, the contributors examine writings ranging from novels and poetry to autobiography, utopian fiction, and essays. And they consider familiar figures like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson alongside such lesser-known writers as Melusina Fay Peirce, Susie King Taylor, and Mary Gove Nichols. Each essay revises the binary notions that have been ascribed to males and females, such as public and private, rational and intuitive, political and domestic, violent and passive. Although they do not deny the existence of separate spheres, the contributors show the boundary between them to be much more blurred than has been assumed until now.
PrefaceIntroductionM. ElbertMonikaIntertextuality and Authorial InterconnectednessTo Be a “Parlor Soldier”: Susan Warner's Answer to Emerson's “Self-Reliance”L. Damon-BachLucinda“Astra Castra”: Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Harriet Prescott SpoffordRodierKatharineThe War of Susie King TaylorS. NultonKarenNo Separations in the City: The Public-Private Novel and Private-Public AuthorshipE. WaldronKarenBody Politics: Framing the Female BodyThe Ungendered Terrain of Good Health: Mary Gove Nichols's Rewriting of the Diseased Institution of MarriageKeetleyDawnMale Doctors and Female Illness in American Women's Fiction, 1850–1900NewberryFrederickGender Bending: Two Role-Reversal Utopias by Nineteenth-Century WomenLewesDarbyOn the Home Front and Beyond: Domesticity and the MarketplaceA Homely Business: Melusina Fay Peirce and Late-Nineteenth-Century Cooperative HousekeepingNadine GibsonLisetteNarratives of Domestic Imperialism: The African-American Home in the Colored American Magazine and the Novels of Pauline Hopkins, 1900–1903BernardiDebraPublic Women, Private Acts: Gender and Theater in Turn-of-the-Century American NovelsCostello BrezinaJenniferSentimental SubversionsGender Valences of Transcendentalism: The Pursuit of Idealism in Elizabeth Oakes-Smith's “The Sinless Child”Louise KeteMarySentimental Epistemologies in Uncle Tom's Cabin and The House of the Seven GablesNobleMarianne“I Try to Make the Reader Feel”: The Resurrection of Bess Streeter Aldrich's A Lantern in Her Hand and the Politics of the Literary CanonD. KnightDeniseContributorsIndex
Monika M. Elbert is Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University, New Jersey.
"Separate Spheres No More makes a significant contribution to recent revisionist work by feminist scholars who are questioning the idea of 'separate spheres' and 'the cult of true womanhood.' Like earlier feminist literary criticism, this collection represents a logical outgrowth of new cultural-historical scholarship, as it reveals 19th- and early 20th-century women exercising public power and effecting social change." —Leland S Person, The University of Alabama at Birmingham
"This collection enters vigorously into ongoing conversations about the shape and future of the American literary canon. Offering a compelling view of many neglected writers and new ways to read familiar ones, the collection will appeal to a wide readership. Innovative and interesting."—Karen L. Kilcup, University of North Carolina-Greensboro
“Monika Elbert’s essay collection offers a powerful contribution to the ongoing reexamination of separate spheres in nineteenth- and earlytwentieth century American and in American literary criticism.” —South Atlantic Review
