Anonym, verschollen, trivial: Methodological Hindrances in Researching German Women's Literature

Reviewed by: Des femmes en littérature Anne Hajek Reid, Martine . Des femmes en littérature. Paris: Bélin, 2010. Pp. 331. ISBN: 9782701155661. In Des femmes en littérature, Martine Reid seeks to contribute to our scholarly understanding of the gendered nature of literature written by women in France. She reminds us that French women have been both writing and publishing since the Middle Ages. Their existence as producers of literature is not in question. In fact, Reid points to a large body of scholarly work devoted to the study of French women's writing. Nonetheless, she cautions that women's place in overarching descriptions of literary history and in collective memory is still problematic: regardless of the large numbers of texts they produced, relatively few women writers are typically represented today in university curricula or in scholarly reflections on literature. Reid explains this absence by hypothesizing a systematic erasure of women's literary contributions. She argues that during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, male critics capitalized on widely-accepted ideas of gender to marginalize progressively and eventually erase the works of women authors from literary history. Reid adopts a two-fold corrective approach to re-thinking women's place in the literary historical record. She first explores the reception of women authors after the Revolution and then analyzes a variety of post-revolutionary women's novels. Throughout the text, she convincingly argues that women's writing is always "singulière;" each text should be approached as a unique literary creation, not reductively categorized under a monolithic label. The first part of her book, "Discours," aims to sketch a history of the reception of post-revolutionary women authors and to highlight the obstacles facing them as they embarked upon literary careers. In her first chapter, "Défenses et illustrations," Constance Pipelet, Germaine de Staël, and Félicité de Genlis serve as examples of the various ways in which women writers defended their own involvement in literary pursuits given the social constraints of gender. In chapter two, "Bas-bleus," Reid turns her attention to pictorial representations of women writers in the nineteenth century. She examines criticism of the bas-bleu in the illustrations of Jules Janin, Frédéric Soulié, and Honoré Daumier. For her, these images represent commonly held perceptions of women writers as a threat to social order because of their perceived transgression or rejection of socially accepted gender roles, especially those of wife and mother. By creating laughable images of women authors, caricaturists took the first step in what Reid views as a process aimed at erasing women's literary contributions. The third chapter, "À Titre d'hommage," examines works by Sainte-Beuve and Lamartine to illustrate further the nineteenth century's growing hostility toward women's literary involvement. At the end of part one, Reid turns to the field of literary history, to demonstrate definitively the existence of a slow process aimed at expunging women writers from the French literary record. She shows how, by the end of the nineteenth century, [End Page 329] women writers had been successfully relegated to the margins of literary history. For Reid, the effects of the process are felt even today: although a significant number of Anglophone and Francophone scholars have excavated and explored many forgotten works, women authors have been only weakly integrated into the broad scope of literary history and have yet to occupy their true place. In the second half of her book, "Fictions," Reid turns to literary texts, primarily novels, to illustrate the ways in which gender affected women's literary production. By using gender as a critical lens, Reid hopes to begin the process of fully integrating women's writing into the literary historical record. Before beginning her in-depth textual analyses, she explores the implications of publication for women. Then, she examines and questions the common association of women with the novel, suggesting that persistent association of women with the genre was yet another effort to keep women on the margins of literature. In chapters seven through twelve, Reid carefully analyzes novels of varying lengths by a diverse selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers. Her goal is to reveal the extreme...

GELFANT, Blanche H., ed. The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. 660 pp. $80.00. NAGEL, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2001. 297 pp. $49.95. WOGAN-BROWNE, Jocelyn. Saints' Lives and Women's Literary Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. xvi, 314 pp. $80. NEILL, Michael. Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. xii, 417 pp. $34.50. ULMER, William A. The Christian Wordsworth, 1798-1805. Albany: SUNY P, 2001. xv, 228 pp. $21.95. BIRCHALL, Diana. Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton. Champaign: U Illinois P, 2001. xxii, 252 pp. $29.95. THURSTON, Michael. Making Something Happen: American Poetry Between the World Wars. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 2001. viii, 272 pp. $49.95/$19.95. (Cultural Studies of the United States Series) HOWARD, June. Publishing the Family. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. xi, 337 pp. $18.95. (New Americanists Series) HOWELLS, William Dean, et al. The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. li, 341 pp. $18.95.

Making an Impact: Cultural Studies, Media and Contemporary Work

This special issue of the CLR James Journal focuses on a highly neglected area of Caribbean cultural life: its philosophy. Although philosophy has been an integral part of much of the writing done in the region, very little effort has been devoted to analyzing its nature and identity. A cursory look at our patterns of discursive use will reveal the hiddeness and neglect that characterize our philosophical practice. Caribbean philosophy has existed and continues to exist as the under-thematized, pre-theoretica l foundations of creative work in more established disciplines such as economics, political science, literature, history and the arts. We are yet to release our philosophy from this implicit subterranean existence and explicitly recognize its place and status in the division of labor between our disciplines. The essays in this issue examine aspects of the philosophy of CLR James, and link them to a number of broader issues such as authenticity, traditional African philosophy, and Marxism. In taking up this philosophical project, we are fulfilling one of the promised goals of this journal: to be a forum for the general ideas (not only James's) that inform and cut across the intellectual and social practices of Caribbean people. At a minimum, philosophy is an activity of discursive understanding in which information is organized, arguments made, and conclusions reached via the exercise of the human faculty of reason. Philosophy gives us the timeless view of the world as disclosed by reason and is a celebration of reason. However, in spite of its quest for universal and ahistorical truths, philosophical production, like all discursive production, is rooted in history and shaped by the cultural context in which it is practiced. Consequently, in some societies (or in different periods of the same society)

Bureaucratization in social movements generally refers to the formalization of social movement organizations in terms of record keeping, decision‐making procedures, and division of labor. Although movement organizations never become as complex in their structures as bureaucracies such as corporations or government agencies, movements often develop organizations that meet minimal standards of bureaucratic organization. In The Strategy of Social Protest (1990: 91), William Gamson defines a bureaucratic challenging group as having at least three elements: some type of written document that describes its purpose and operating procedures; a list of members; and three or more levels of internal divisions such as officers, committees, and rank and file members. Although centralization of power is often seen as a feature of bureaucracy, Gamson distinguishes the two as characteristics of challenging groups, noting that bureaucratic organizations may lack a single center of power.

Reviewed by: Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market Lyn Pykett (bio) Linda H. Peterson . Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. 308 pp. ISBN 978-0691140179, $35.00. Towards the end of the eighteenth century a change occurred, so Virginia Woolf asserted in Chapter Four of A Room of One's Own, that was more important than the War of the Roses: middle-class women began to write for money. Woolf claimed that it was this "solid fact that women could make money by writing" that underpinned "the extreme activity of mind" among women in the late eighteenth century. It also enabled them to be taken seriously, for "money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for." In fact, because writing remained an insecure source of income with relatively low rates of pay for at least the first half of the nineteenth century, it was difficult for either men or women to earn a living solely from their pen. Moreover, for much of the nineteenth century both male writers and female writers alike were engaged in a struggle to gain recognition for writing or the pursuit of literature as a profession on a par with the practice of law or medicine. This is the context for Linda Peterson's fascinating exploration of the continuing but by no means smooth development of women's professional authorship during the nineteenth century. Unsurprisingly, Peterson links the flowering of women's literary professionalism to both the development of new genres and the opening up of established genres, which accompanied the rapid expansion of print culture in the nineteenth century. Women increasingly entered the literary marketplace and the profession of letters as writers for periodicals, often under the cover of the anonymity that was the norm for periodical authors until after mid-century. The originality of this important contribution to the history of authorship in Victorian Britain lies in its [End Page 374] demonstration of how, throughout the nineteenth century, women writers self-consciously constructed specific authorial identities for themselves in relation to particular myths or discourses of authorship. Peterson organizes her study around three key moments in the development of discourses of professional authorship: the rise of the periodical press and the move towards more adequate payment for writing in the 1830s; the mid-century campaign for copyright and the attempts of both male and female writers to define their contribution to the nation; and the renewed drive for professional recognition in the 1880s and 1890s at the time of the establishment of the Society of Authors. A lengthy and richly informative first chapter gives an overview of the nineteenth-century history of the profession of letters, and then, perhaps more importantly for readers of this journal, Peterson moves to a case study approach based on the biographies of, biographical writings about, and autobiographical writings by, six nineteenth-century women authors. These case studies focus on women whose literary innovations and public self-constructions as writers (or, in some cases, their public construction by others) are seen by Peterson as pivotal in the history of authorship. Some of the case studies focus on writers whose professional success outlived them, others on those who simply enjoyed professional success in their own day. The case studies begin with Harriet Martineau, a central figure in the book and, Peterson suggests, perhaps the most prominent woman of letters of the nineteenth century. Martineau's autobiography and letters, in which she presents herself as emerging from a long apprenticeship as a solitary and pioneering authoress, are reread alongside a reexamination of the trajectory of her career to show how she progressed from a fairly conventional "feminine" beginning writing devotional literature, didactic tracts, and essays and tales on religious and moral subjects, to reinvent herself as a public commentator on the leading matters of the day-who by 1858 (as Valerie Sanders has shown) was informing the editor of the Edinburgh Review that "I'm your man" to write an article on the repatriation of slave laborers to Liberia, and by 1859 was expressing the hope that he would find that she...

In 1825, a nearly seven-foot-tall marble statue was erected in St Paul's Chapel in Westminster Abbey to memorialize James Watt, the Scottish engineer who perfected and manufactured what may be the most influential invention of our contemporary age: the steam engine. Victorian steam technologies harnessed the power of nature to create and expand energy systems, effectively ushering in an age of innovation and invention that boasted developments such as the spinning jenny, the power loom, the railway system, and the mechanized printing press. While impressive, such technologies were also instrumental in producing environmental destruction and industrial violence. As the nineteenth century progressed, it became clear to all – from the Luddite machine breakers of the early 1800s to the compilers of the Parliamentary Blue Books in the 1830s to Queen Victoria, who refused to visit London when the “sea-coale” was too thick – that steam technologies were creating immense environmental and social upheavals. While British historians have widely documented women’s involvement in the rise of steam power, literary critics have largely neglected women writers’ responses to steam technologies. Moreover, the contribution of working-class women to steam energy systems has been almost completely ignored. This exclusion is ironic considering that women’s employment rates reached a peak during the Industrial Revolution when women made up 60-80% of the workforce. Clearly, women had an enormous role in the transformation and dissemination of energy in Victorian Britain; yet, few of these women’s narratives were told in the literature of the period. My dissertation, “The steam that is to work the engines:” Women’s Writing and the Rise of Steam Power in Victorian Britain, seeks to fill this gap. The title of my dissertation, a reference to George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866), expresses a commitment to unearthing submerged literary histories and signifies that Victorian women’s labor, both on and off the page, can be understood as a force of energy that simultaneously fueled and resisted the Industrial Revolution. Thus, my work reveals an expansive range of middle- and working-class women’s literary contributions from the nineteenth century. Although considerable criticism exists on the early Victorian industrial novel, literary scholarship has repeatedly overlooked women’s responses to the Industrial Revolution more broadly throughout the century and has generally neglected the link between women and steam energy systems. I propose that, by concentrating on an expansive archive of nineteenth-century women’s writing, we might better understand steam energy as a foundation for issues of labor, environmental change, and women’s rights. In turning to the literary, this dissertation seeks to answer three questions: 1.) What does Victorian women’s writing reveal about the production, implementation, and dissemination of steam power? 2.) To what extent do Victorian women writers participate in an emerging nineteenth-century energy science? and 3.) How can nineteenth-century women’s writing help us to understand how steam power and energy science affect vulnerable groups, especially women? In answering these questions, this dissertation seeks to analyze how women’s writing intervened (on the level of content as well as form) in conversations about steam energy and the emerging energy science that accompanied steam technologies. In turning to middle- and laboring-class women authors, I intend to show that, when it came to the Age of Steam, literary women were far from silent.

This book explores the use of literary fantasy in the construction of identity and ‘home’ in contemporary diasporic Chinese women’s literature. It argues that the use of fantasy acts as a way of undermining the power of patriarchy and unsettling fixed notions of home. The idea of home explored in this book relates to complicated struggles to gain a sense of belonging, as experienced by marginalized subjects in constructing their diasporic identities — which can best be understood as unstable, shifting, and shaped by historical conditions and power relations. Fantasy is seen to operate in the corpus of this book as a literary mode, as defined by Rosemary Jackson. Literary fantasy offers a way to rework ancient myths, fairy tales, ghost stories and legends; it also subverts conventional narratives and challenges the power of patriarchy and other dominant ideologies. Through a critical reading of four diasporic Chinese women authors, namely, Maxine Hong Kingston, Adeline Yen Mah, Ying Chen and Larissa Lai, this book aims to offer critical insights into how their works re-imagine a ‘home’ through literary fantasy which leads beyond nationalist and Orientalist stereotypes; and how essentialist conceptions of diasporic culture are challenged by global geopolitics and cultural interactions.

This article offers new insights into women’s occupational identities and the production of art in seventeenth-century London. The identification of a previously overlooked portraitist named Anne Wemyss (1633–98) shows that she was part of a much wider circle of artists and elite patrons active during this period. An exploration of the training afforded to a number of female Painter-Stainers’ Company apprentices that were connected to artistic households, followed by a micro-historical study of the gender division of labour in Mary Beale’s household studio, further credits women’s creative work in the wider economy.

Acting is a tool that can bring satisfaction to performers and audiences alike, particularly when understanding inspires connections to another person and to a historical character. This chapter outlines the lessons and challenges one may face when building a historical character, particularly when that portrayal is based on the complex history of the United States. For performers of color, race is part of the process. For educators who plan to perform themselves, to prepare students to create history-based performances, or to have students observe professional portrayals, cultural and racial awareness is key. A people's heritage ― with its beliefs, traditions, and even trauma ― cannot be separated from their individual or collective stories. Culture and race represent a crucial part of their narrative and their identity. Drawing from childhood stories of life in the segregation era, the author explains what it meant then and now to “walk another way” in developing racial awareness, sharing how these memories have affected her professional and creative work. This chapter illustrates the multiple considerations involved in presenting characters from different time periods and culture. In particular, portraying characters or telling stories concerning America's history of oppression can impact the audience as well as the performer. The author shares her perspective as an African-American woman, explaining in detail the logistics of performance experience as a whole. She uses examples from her own character development of people of color from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries to illustrate how the use of research and primary documents contribute to script development.

A sample of 19 American and British women authors, born before 1910 and still publishing, shows a consistent life pattern: their first publication was relatively late (median 31 years) and they were recognized late (median 39 years). Follow-up research will assemble biographical data for a larger number of living women writers over 65 years of age, comparing these with women authors (1) born before 1800, (2) born 1800-1850, (3) born 1851-1899, (4) born 1900-1910. Because these individuals are (1) middle-class, (2) educated above the level of their cohorts, (3) engaged in socially acceptable mental activity, their life patterns may yield interesting information about the relationship between social class, continued meaningful activity, and longevity in different historical periods.

Liberalization in the finance industry in Kenya has led to increased access to credit facilities to Kenyan employees. Primary school teachers are among the beneficiaries. The objectives of this study were to: evaluate the effects of school fees loans on household financial health of primary school teachers in Emining division, assess the effects of home improvement loans on household financial health of primary school teachers in Emining division, examine the effects of emergency loans on household financial health of primary school teachers in Emining division and establish the effects of development loans on household financial health of primary school teachers in Emining division. The study used descriptive research design. Purposive sampling was used to collect data from 165 respondents, 5 teachers from each of the thirty three primary schools, in Emining Division, Baringo. Biographic data on the respondents was analyzed using descriptive statistics such as percentages. Primary data for this study was collected using structured questionnaire. The questionnaire was self-administered. Regression was conducted to test the effect of the various independent variables pooled together on the dependent variable. Two tail t-test and ANOVA test was used to determine the degree of significance of the relationship. The data analyzed was presented in form of tables. Relationships between unsecured personal loans and household financial health of primary school teachers in Emining division was determined at alpha level of p<0.05. Results of the study showed that there is statistical significant relationship between unsecured personal loans and household financial health. Findings of the study also revealed that there is a strong positive relationship between unsecured personal loans and household financial health with a significance value of p= 0.000. Therefore the study concluded that there is strong positive statistical significant relationship between unsecured personal loans and household financial health of primary school teachers in Emining Division, Baringo County, Kenya.

1. Introduction The fact that the Song Celebrations form an important part of the Estonian culture, and constitute a pillar of our national identity is obvious to everyone in Estonia. Sadly, this is where it ends. We have become used to viewing our Song Celebrations as single cultural events, while their broader context as the Song Celebration Movement is often neglected. My article focuses on the Estonian Song Celebration Movement, as well as on the activities of Tuudur Vettik, who played an important role in shaping it. Did Vettik indeed become the leader of the Song Celebration Movement, and what contributed to this? Tuudur Vettik is by no means unknown in historical research; however, he has been pushed to the sidelines. Information about his life and creative work reached research papers in 1988, at the dawn of the Singing Revolution. The role of Vettik in Estonian music life has been researched by Helju Tauk (Tauk 1988:89), and Urve Lippus (Lippus 2002:7-78). Lippus highlights the strong ties between Vettik and the Estonian national culture, music, and patriotic ideas. In her book, Urve Lippus points out the need to broaden the source basis of research, among other things, and puts emphasis on memoirs as valuable sources besides the archival and press materials (Lippus 2011:9-10). Maris Mannik-Kirme has done a remarkable job in returning Tuudur Vettik to the Estonian culture. She has studied the activities of Tuudur Vettik and Mart Saar in enriching Estonian choir music (Mannik-Kirme 1982:219-234), and has published a factological review of Tuudur Vettik's biography, as well as a list of his works (Mannik 1990). Unfortunately, these analyses reproduce some incorrect facts from earlier studies concerning to Vettik's birthplace and birthdates, which are very important biographical data (Randjarv 2012:26). Generalisations have also slipped in. In my research of Tuudur Vettik, I have scrutinised the relevant literature, news publications, and archival materials (the results of which, however, only serve as the background for this article). I have also set great store by the memoirs of Vettik's contemporaries, and people connected to the Song Celebration Movement, as well as the handwritten notes and journals in private archives. The latter sources throw a light on the developments and intrigues not discussed elsewhere, as well as on what went on during the organisation of Song Celebrations. Well-known choir conductors and teachers have been interviewed by the author (Randjarv 2012:157-226). The incentive for writing this article came from a recent article by Hain Rebas, which once again pointed out the erroneous interpretations, gaps, and insufficiently researched questions surrounding the Song Celebration Movement (Rebas 2016/1:129-150). 2. Song Celebration Movement 2.1. General facts The historical and cultural studies describe the regular Song Celebrations as extremely important and ceremonious cultural events; yet the relevant repertoire policy, criteria for selecting the Head Conductors, activities of the choirs during the intervals of the Song Celebrations, events for different types of choirs, repertoire training for conductors, but also interpersonal conflicts, intrigues and cooperation, dependency on the national budgetary policy, and ideological trends have not been analysed as organic components of the phenomenon, but rather as a purely illustrative and emotional background. The Song Celebration Movement has several particular features that allow it to mould, and be moulded by social developments. The most important among these is the development of a social network. Although the Song Celebrations as events have been the most visible and important feature of our choir history, their role cannot be viewed apart from their foundations--the history of the Estonian choir culture, and our societies movement. I use the term Song Celebration Movement to signify a higher integrated system where the content and the format of the work, including the repertoire policy, clearly follow the seasonal cycle of the work plans of the national as well as county level song festivals, and those for specific choir types, the preliminary singing competitions (for categorisation), and eventually also the working plans of the choirs. …

". . . so you can see, color makes no difference":Race, Slavery and Abolition in A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life Xiomara Santamarina A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, published in 1859 by freeborn Cincinnati hairdresser Eliza Potter, offers modern readers a voice that contradicts many of our understandings of nineteenth-century African American literature. An exciting first-hand account of work, race, and femininity, this narrative speaks to the possibilities for "working womanhood" that dressing white women's hair offered a Black working woman in the United States before the Civil War. Given that, in her day (as in ours), many Americans considered Black women's labor for white women to be menial and without value, the fact that Eliza Potter published opinionated and largely disparaging insights about the rich white women who were her social superiors is nothing short of remarkable. While we might safely assume that Black working women commonly perceived their white female employers in less than flattering terms, what makes this instance of frankness so singular is that it was published, read, and reviewed by white readers, some of whom were likely the clients she spoke about.1 Alternately irreverent and high-minded, Potter the author delights and scandalizes readers with accounts of social-climbing, or "parvenu," women, all the while never letting her readers forget that she earned high wages and accumulated quite a bit of money as one of the nation's earliest beauticians (13). Potter's focus on the foibles of her elite clients and the "domestic bitterness" featured in their lives, combined with a scarcity of biographical data on Potter herself, has kept A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life on the margins of nineteenth-century African American literary studies ("The Author's Appeal" iv). This is a rich field centrally concerned with slavery, racism, and African American activism geared around abolition and uplift. Problematically, A Hairdresser's Experience makes no reference to racial injustices and has a peripatetic [End Page 171] narrator whose central investment is a "desire to see the world" (11), resisting some of our rubrics for literary race relations in nineteenth-century public print spheres. Given what we know about African American women's difficult negotiations of femininity and their racial proximity to slave women in the cultural imaginary, we have to wonder how a Black working woman could have cultivated the kind of authority Potter displays in her text. Could she have been passing for white? Also, how could a Black woman author represent herself as an independent working woman who proclaims her "liberty" in the book's first paragraph and not as a goal to be reached at its end (11)? Elsewhere, I have argued for the importance of A Hairdresser's Experience on the basis of its unconventional insights into the ways that some Black working women were able to shape their identities as entrepreneurs and social critics even when they remained on the political margins of a nation that viewed them as irrelevant (see Belabored Professions). Part travel narrative and part work narrative, A Hairdresser's Experience dramatizes the authorship possibilities enabled by Potter's hard-won economic independence, but it also speaks to the benefits that Potter reaped because she expressed many of the culture's anxieties about the well-being of femininity and classed identity during the nation's commercial expansion (Santamarina 103–38). That is, even if Potter's subordinate race and class made her an unlikely candidate for the role of "social critic," the fact that she articulated many of the anxieties associated with the period's fear of "confidence men and painted women," to use Karen Halttunen's term, offered her legitimacy among her readers that she might not otherwise have had. It would be a disservice to Potter and to her narrative, however, to suggest that the significance of A Hairdresser's Experience resides only in the singular position of its author relative to her employers, her readers, and the text's principal subject matter, elite white womanhood. This autobiographical narrative also speaks to the fact that Potter's travels among southern and northern elites exposed her to dimensions of slavery that often challenged fundamental abolitionist premises...