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Full-Text Articles in American Literature
Did A Woman Write “The Great American Novel”? Judging Women’S Fiction In The Nineteenth Century And Today, Melissa J. Homestead
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
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
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 …