Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review Of Early Women Filmmakers 1911–1940, Wheeler Winston Dixon

Department of English: Faculty Publications

After more than a half century of neglect, pioneering women filmmakers are finally getting some of the attention they deserve. Foremost among these women is the figure of Alice Guy Blaché—also known simply as Alice Guy, before she married Herbert Blaché in 1907—who was responsible for numerous “firsts” in cinema history: the first film with narrative La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Patch Fairy; 1896), as well as early experiments with color dye processes, synchronized sound recording, multi-reel films, and other cinematic advances. Gaumont put out a set of her French films for that company—she was the …

The Victorian Body, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The nineteenth century is extremely important for the study of embodiment because it is the period in which the modern body, as we currently understand it, was most thoroughly explored. This was the era when modern medical models of the body were developed and disseminated, when modern political relations to the body were instantiated, and when modern identities in relation to class, race, and gender were inscribed. While questions about the distinctions between personhood and the body were studied by the ancients, nineteenth-century developments in technology, economics, medicine, and science rendered such categories newly important for Britons who were the …

The Role Of George Henry Lewes In George Eliot’S Career: A Reconsideration, Beverley Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article examines the “protection” and “encouragement” George Henry Lewes provided to Eliot throughout her fiction-writing career. According to biographers, Lewes showed his selfless devotion to Eliot by encouraging her to begin and continue writing fiction; by fostering the mystery of her authorship; by managing her finances; by negotiating her publishing contracts; by managing her schedule; by hosting a salon to promote her books; and by staying close by her side for twenty-four years until death parted them. By reconsidering each element of Lewes’s devotion separately, Rilett challenges the prevailing construction of the Eliot–Lewes relationship as the ideal partnership of …

Introduction To E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering A Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, Melissa J. Homestead, Pamela T. Washington

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In early 1901, Willa Cather visited Prospect Cottage in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the longtime home of the recently deceased novelist Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevirte (E. D. E. N.) Southworth. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1819 to southern parents (her father from Virginia, her mother from Maryland), Southworth lived in Washington with her family until she married Frederick Hamilton Southworth and moved with him to Wisconsin in 1841. When he deserted her and their two children,' she returned to Washington and taught school to support herself, running to writing to supplement her income from teaching. Within a few …

A Chronological Bibliography Of E. D. E. N. Southworth's Works Privileging Periodical Publication, Melissa J. Homestead, Vicki L. Martin

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Previous attempts at a comprehensive bibliography of E. D. E. N. Southworth's fiction have organized her works alphabetically by book title or chronologically by book publication date. Serialization information--if included at all--is subordinated to book entries or listed separately. These bibliographic conventions better suit authors who published fewer novels than Southworth did and/or did \ not routinely serialize their works. As a result, earlier bibliographies have caused confusion about the size and chronology of Southworth's body of work. Adding to the confusion, her book publisher T. B. Peterson arbitrarily broke many of her novels that appeared in serial form under …

From Periodical To Book In Her Early Career: E. D. E. N. Southworth’S Letters To Abraham Hart, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

E.D.E.N. Southworth's correspondence with Henry Peterson of the Saturday Evening Post and Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger, both of whom serialized her novels in their weekly story papers, is sometimes dramatic and emotional. In September 1849 Peterson chided Southworth for a “capital literary error” in an installment of her novel The Deserted Wife, in which the Reverend Withers uses his patriarchal authority to maneuver the young, unwilling Sophie Churchill into marriage. The incident would make readers “thro[w] down the tale in disgust,” he warns, and he omitted it from the serialization. In December 1854 he raised …

Introduction To Willa Cather And Modern Cultures [Cather Studies 9], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

To some, linking Willa Cather to "the modern" or more narrowly to literary modernism still seems an eccentric proposition. As Richard Millington has pointed out, "one will look in vain for Cather's name in the index of most accounts, whether new or old, of the nature and history of Anglo-American modernism" (52). Perhaps she fails to feature in these accounts because in her public pronouncements and certain recurring motifs in her fiction, she appeared to turn her back on modernity. Cather was skeptical about many aspects of the culture that took shape around her in the early decades of the …

Willa Cather [From Blackwell Encyclopedia Of Twentieth-Century American Fiction], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Willa Cather is known primarily for her novels representing the experiences of women immigrants on the Nebraska prairies in the late nineteenth century, but Cather’s 10 novels and scores of short stories’ produced over a career spanning 50 years actually range widely over space and time, from seventeenth-century Quebec to twentieth century New York. A social conservative who proudly identified herself as one of the backward-looking, her experiments with fictional form and her approach to culture nevertheless ally her with modernism. It is, perhaps, the depth and diversity of Cather’s body of work and the impossibility of reducing her achievement …

Did A Woman Write “The Great American Novel”? Judging Women’S Fiction In The Nineteenth Century And Today, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In the fall of 2009, as I was preparing to teach a senior capstone course for English majors on the nineteenth-century American novel and questions of literary value and the canon, I went trolling for suggestions of recent secondary readings about canonicity. The response came back loud and clear: “The canon wars are over. We all teach whatever we want to teach, and everything is fine.” My experiences with students suggest that, at least in American literary studies before 1900, the canon wars are not over, or, perhaps, they have entered a new stage. Most of my students had heard …

Edith Lewis As Editor, Every Week Magazine, And The Contexts Of Cather's Fiction, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

On 26 August 1915 the New York Times reported the spectacle of two "Women Editors" who became "Lost in Colorado Canon" as a "Result of Trip with Inexperienced Guide." "Miss Willa Sibert Cather, a former editor of McClure's Magazine, and Miss Edith Lewis, assistant editor at Every Week, had a nerve-racking experience in the Mesa Verde wilds," they reported, giving Lewis and Cather roughly equivalent status as magazine professionals and comic fodder ("Lost"). The war in Europe was still far away for most Americans that August, although the sinking of the Lusitania in May had inched the conflict closer. In …

Susanna Rowson’S Transatlantic Career, Melissa J. Homestead, Camryn Hansen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The contention that Charlotte is best understood as part of Rowson’s career, a career that spanned a period of years and the Atlantic Ocean, is central to our analysis and to the recovery of Rowson’s authorial agency. In Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America, Angela Vietto argues for the importance of the “literary career” as a category of analysis for women, of “examinin[g] the course writers followed in their pursuit of writing as a vocation—their progress in a variety of kinds of projects, both in their texts and in their performances as authors” (91). Although we leave the work …

Review Of Kate Field: The Many Lives Of A Nineteenth-Century American Journalist And Maria Mitchell And The Sexing Of Science: An Astronomer Among The American Romantics, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Literary historians writing biographies have increasingly shifted from critical biography (the author’s life as a means to interpret his or her literary works) to cultural biography (an author’s life and works in various cultural contexts). As literary historians whose biographical subjects (both nineteenth-century American women) are not primarily literary figures, Bergland and Scharnhorst represent a further step away from critical biography.

As a journalist (and popular lecturer, advocate of reform, playwright, and actress), Kate Field is a more literary figure than astronomer Maria Mitchell, but Scharnhorst has produced neither a critical nor a cultural biography. Instead, he presents a chronological …

Review Of Axes: Willa Cather And William Faulkner And Violence, The Arts, And Willa Cather, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Willa Cather and William Faulkner represent an intriguing and potentially productive pairing for comparative study. Their works and careers are located at the rich intersection between regional ism and modernism, and both early 20th-century writers often looked back to the 19th century in their fiction. Even in the absence of influence or intertextual reference, these commonalities would give a literary historian much to say. However, in her study of these two authors, Merrill Maguire Skaggs exhaustively catalogs similarities and differences as proof of a decades-long competition between the authors at the expense of depth and subtlety in her analysis of …

Review Of Women And Authorship In Revolutionary America And Learning To Stand And Speak: Women, Education, And Public Life In America’S Republic, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Two books published in the 1980s had a deep influence on the study of American women novelists of the early republic and the antebellum era. Mary Kelley’s Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (1984) presented twelve popular women novelists as deeply conflicted about their role as public producers of culture. The chapters in Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986) that treat women novelists and their readers as worthy of serious analysis significantly altered the course of scholarship on the early American novel. Angela Vietto clearly frames Women and Authorship …

Review Of Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women In America, 1850-1900, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Like Naomi Z. Sofer's Making the America of Art (2005) and Anne E. Boyd's Writing for Immorality (2004), Susan Williams Reclaiming Authorship seeks to recreate and analyze how American women authors in the second half of the nineteenth century understood their own authorship. All three include Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson as subjects, but Williams includes authors who did not conceive of their authorship in a high cultural mode (Maria Cummins, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Abigail Dodge), and she traverses the careers of Alcott and Phelps so as to emphasize their movements in and out of …

Willa Cather [From The Oxford Encyclopedia Of Women In World History], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

American novelist, Born in Virginia, Cather moved with her family to Nebraska in 1883 and is best known as a novelist of the American prairie. However, her life history and literary output belie this characterization. As a student at the University of Nebraska she published short stories and poems and worked as a journalist. This experience earned her a position at the Home Monthly magazine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When the magazine failed, she stayed in Pittsburgh, first returning to newspaper journalism and then teaching high school. For several years she lived in the family home of Isabelle McClung, a young …

Louisa May Alcott [From Oxford Encyclopedia Of Women In World History], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

American fiction writer best known as the author of the girls’ novel Little Women (1868-1869). Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to Abigail May Alcott and the progressive educator Bronson Alcott. The March family of Little Women was an idealized version of her own family, which was far less stable and more mobile. Alcott’s father’s idealistic education, and reform ventures regularly failed, necessitating the family’s frequent moves, and she and her mother increasingly provided the family’s economic support. Her childhood and adolescence were split primarily between Concord and Boston, Massachusetts, where she was deeply influenced by members of her father’s …

Introduction To Signet Classic's The Song Of The Lark By Willa Cather (2007), Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In May of 1912, Willa Cather traveled to Winslow, Arizona, to visit her brother, Douglass, who worked for the railroad. The year before, she had begun a leave of absence from McClure's Magazine, where she had been an editor since 1906, so that she could focus her energies on writing fiction. Although she had been publishing short fiction regularly since 1892, her first novel-the cosmopolitan, somewhat derivative Alexander's Bridge ‒ did not appear until 1912. Feeling tired and unwell, she, like many other Americans, sought renewal in the dry air and open spaces of the desert. After six years in …

Chronological Bibliography Of The Works Of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lucinda Damon-Bach, Allison Roepsch, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This two-part bibliography has been built by consulting the Bibliography of American Literature (BAL) and the bibliographies compiled by Sister Mary Michael Welsh ("Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Her Position in the Literature and Thought of Her Time up to 1860," Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1937) and Richard Ranus Gidez ("A Study of the Works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick," Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1958); library cataloging records; and the personal records of Lucinda Damon-Bach and Melissa J. Homestead. In most cases, entries have been confirmed through books, periodicals, photocopies, or microfilm received through interlibrary loan. We were not able …

Behind The Veil? Catharine Sedgwick And Anonymous Publication, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Sedgwick's name appeared on the title page of only one of her books published during her lifetime, her 1835 Tales and Sketches, a volume collecting pieces that had originally appeared in the annually published "gift books" in the preceding nine years. Sedgwick is the earliest writer included in Mary Kelley's influential book on women's authorship, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America, and Kelley claims that women writers published anonymously or pseudonymously because of the great anxiety that appearing in public through the medium of print caused them: "The literary domestics could write and, as …