Des femmes en littérature (review)

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.

Zora Neale Hurston's work in the woman-centered narrative, particularly Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), connects African American women's literary production in the second half of the twentieth century to African American women's literary production in the nineteenth century. Alice Walker epitomizes this connection in her acknowledgment of Hurston's significance in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), the volume prefaced by Walker's four-part womanist aesthetic. Critics and other readers recognize Walker's resurrection of Hurston's exuberant spirit in Shug Avery of The Color Purple (1982). Walker pays tribute to Hurston and other black foremothers who paved the way, even under the most difficult circumstances. She acknowledges, as well, the efforts of her sisters in struggle in the mid-twentieth-century social movements: “Women have, over the last twenty years, really forged a community of readers, writers, and activists. That is what we're seeing. We're seeing that feminists and womanists have actually come of age, so that we are able to talk to each other.”

Nina Baym: June 14, 1936—June 15, 2018

In 1895 Frances Harper begins her poem “The Martyr of Alabama” with the following news item from 1894: “Tim Thompson, a little negro boy, was asked to dance for the amusement of some white toughs. He refused, saying he was a church member. One of the men knocked him down with a club and then danced upon his prostrate form. He then shot the boy in the hip. The boy is dead; his murderer still at large” (Edelstein 9). By beginning a “fictional” poem in this way, Sari Edelstein contends in Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women's Writing, Harper “formally stages the relationship of poetry to the press,” suggesting that poetry must take over the news because the facts (such as they are) do not reveal truth (9). Over the long nineteenth century, Edelstein argues, works of fiction and poetry written by U.S. women authors dialectically engage, rewrite, and remake the various modes of writing employed by the press. In so doing, they offer a dynamic and often critical relationship to the form and content of journalistic media and attempt to intervene in the political consciousness of their era. A tradition of American women's writing therefore can be located between the novel and the news, between journalistic and novelistic modes of writing. Edelstein's book astutely demonstrates that American women writers have always been attuned to the power and practice of journalism and have sought to counterbalance the limits of this form in innovative and socially conscious ways.The book is a concise, exceptionally readable, and eloquently written appraisal, then, of the way two influential modes of discourse shaped each other, and in turn shaped the public's conceptualization of the limits and ethics of journalistic practice. In five chapters, the book evaluates the major journalistic forms of the nineteenth century and examines how women authors both contested and utilized these forms. By focusing on the emergence of a partisan press (chapter one), the penny press (chapter two), the story-papers (chapter three), Civil War newspaper reportage and eyewitness journalism (chapter four), and the links between journalism and realism (chapter five), Edelstein provides both an excellent overview of the rise of different journalistic modes in the nineteenth century and a powerful evaluation of the methods through which women writers engaged these journalistic modes. Explicitly writing against the idea that the novel or fiction was meant to detach readers from the social world, Edelstein instead demonstrates that fictional modes work as an alternative to journalism—an alternative that can be “an educative, socializing medium capable of unifying and enlightening readers” (28). Fiction at times critiques the idea of journalistic truth itself, while at other times it fulfills the promise of an informing, utilitarian, truthful, moral language that journalism fails to provide.The book begins with a chapter focused on Judith Sargent Murray, who was arguably America's first American newspaper woman; this chapter considers the way that fiction acts as a “supervisory discourse” (14) in her writing, one that has the power to remake a partisan press. In a compelling discussion of Murray's novel The Story of Margaretta (1798), Edelstein demonstrates that it “thematizes the danger of an unregulated civic realm in which seduction, plagiarism, and duplicity threaten the family, the integrity of credit, and the credibility of the press” (23). Appropriating and critiquing the conventions of the era's journalism, Murray's novel inaugurates American women's fiction as a “hybrid tradition” always in dialogue with periodical culture. More broadly, at a moment when mainstream journalism was not striving for objectivity, early novels such as this one linked “rhetorical and political education” in order to demonstrate “the potential for fiction to trump the newspaper as viable civic discourse” (36). The chapter could have spent a bit more time in its literary analysis of The Story of Margaretta, but it does cover a great deal of territory and effectively establish the terms of the study.The next chapter examines the emergence of the penny papers in the early 1830s, considered by some to be the first mass media. The penny papers themselves were innovative in that they altered who could read newspapers as well as what a newspaper was; they also claimed to “speak the truth without an agenda” (39) even as they fixated on and gained readership through endless stories about fallen women. In an exceptionally perceptive reading of the penny press and the counter discourse offered by Catherine Williams's Fall River: An Authentic Narrative (1833), Edelstein illustrates that women writers used a sentimental aesthetics as an oppositional discourse, contesting the penny press's claim to “monolithic, empirical truth and offering a competing mode of representation rooted in ethics and social responsibility instead of facts” (39). Williams's novel centers on the true story of a woman (Sarah Maria Cornell) who was seduced and then murdered by the Methodist minister Ephraim Avery; Avery went free after he attacked Cornell's virtue in court and claimed her death was a suicide. Williams's novel therefore concerns not so much “social responsibility” over “facts,” but a fuller version of the facts, one that can create a different kind of emotional truth. The chapter pairs Williams's tale of a sexually fallen woman with that of an economically fallen one, as depicted in Catherine Maria Sedgwick's short story “Fanny McDermot” (1845), in order to demonstrate that while these authors do not eroticize dead women to gain readership (as the penny press did), they nonetheless use figurations of imperiled, exploited women to buttress their own brand of truth and propagate a certain set of middle-class values. Particularly useful is this chapter's discussion of how these two writers attempt to teach readers to respond sympathetically to women like Cornell, and to respond to the news itself in a more empathetic manner.Moving into the 1840s and 1850s, chapter three examines the rise of “story-papers” (six-cent weeklies) alongside an analysis of E. D. E. N. Southworth's phenomenally popular novel The Hidden Hand (1859). The story-papers were a hybrid form that could contain editorials, poetry, domestic advice, humor, and fiction in adjacent columns; as such, they functioned as vehicles to register “the era's anxieties about the breakdown of the nation as well as the gender conventions that female authorship threatened to overturn” (68). Serialized within a story-paper, Edelstein argues that the unconventional gender performance of the heroine in The Hidden Hand is only one manifestation of the novel's portrayal of crisis and formal disorganization; like the story-papers themselves Capitola is a figure for a type of border crossing that can undermine many types of binary distinctions. Edelstein does note that both gendered and national norms are reestablished by text's end, but only with ambivalence; ultimately the novel emphasizes the uncertainty of its historical era and generates a vision of the nation as fractured and disordered.The following chapter shows how women writers in the late 1860s undertook representations of the “eyewitness” accounts of the Civil War. Examining Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches (1869) alongside Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868), Edelstein argues that these narratives invite us to read women's writing as “contributions to the journalistic developments of the era as well as meditations on the representational promises of documentary reportage itself” (90). The era of the Civil War saw a major shift in daily newspapers, as the newspaper became an indispensable vehicle for chronicling events. Moreover, in an era before cameras were in wide usage, the writer's eye was viewed as a sort of living photograph, as the war correspondent became a stand-in for the camera. Edelstein's examination of Hospital Sketches emphasizes Alcott's attention to the ways reportage can compromise the self and even physical body of the correspondent; Alcott ultimately produces an account of the insufficiencies and perils of the journalistic enterprise. Keckley, on the other hand, allows her story to disappear into Mary Todd Lincoln's; in so doing Keckley rejects a scopic regime that sought to make her own body an object and assumes ownership of Lincoln's narrative and body, which she refashions for public consumption. Keckley, like Alcott, foregrounds the perspectival nature of knowledge. Although somewhat lightly researched, overall this chapter was a convincing assessment of how two important women writers co-opted and remade journalistic modes.Chapter five assesses three writers—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far)—in the context of the rise of realistic writing and yellow journalism at the end of the century. At times the research in this chapter lacked depth and the broad focus appeared to impede careful analysis of texts. Edelstein's assessment of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) in terms of Gilman's relationship to journalism also seemed somewhat stretched; the argument might have been more successful if it had discussed “The Yellow Wall-Paper” in light of Gilman's later short story “When I Was a Witch” (1910), which directly critiques newspapers. Edelstein is more successful when she discusses Wells-Barnett's journalistic pamphlets on lynching and their critique of the silence and erasures of contemporary print media on this topic. However, this chapter's discussion of Edith Eaton and the methods through which Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) mimics and critiques the idea of the objective neutrality of the journalistic tradition was more suggestive than truly convincing, and Edelstein might have delved further into secondary criticism of Eaton's writing. Still, the chapter does show how, at a moment in literary history often thought to be defined by the interrelationship between realism and journalism, Gilman, Wells-Barnett, and Eaton “suggest that the relationship between these modes was often oppositional and even hostile” (145).The book does have some weaknesses, then, mainly in terms of the depth of its research. Yet as a whole this is a sophisticated and nuanced study that is convincing about its main point, demonstrating that women writers employed and remade journalistic modes throughout the century. It is also crisp, eloquent, concise, and commandingly written. American women's writing is positioned as a tradition inaugurated and sustained by an investment in the public sphere and its most representative discourse, the press. Edelstein scrutinizes the fructifying interrelationship that exists between the popular press and women's writing, and the ways women writers were “careful and critical readers of the press, attuned to journalism's capacity to shape the ideologies about gender, race, nation, and class that undergird American social and political reality” (154). The book is therefore a very valuable addition to studies of women writers in the nineteenth century. Rather than reading the texts discussed as a private form of discourse, Edelstein shows that women's writing must be viewed as a highly visible, often compensatory mode of public engagement that competes with, but also remakes, the powerful journalistic forces with which it is enmeshed.

Norma Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (London: Pimlico, 2004). Pp. 390. £12.50. Betty A. Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Pp. 250. £48. Feminist scholars' endeavors to reposition women writers at the center of cultural and textual production have surely produced some of the most important developments in the field of eighteenth-century studies over the past twenty years. The recovery task that began with landmark publications such as Jane Spencer's The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) and Janet Todd's The Sign of Angellica (1989) inevitably forced a reevaluation of dominant critical paradigms—such as the rise of the novel, the demise of manuscript culture, and the doggedly persistent ideology of separate spheres—which had failed to accord women writers their rightful place within literary history. As these and other works illuminated the complex ways in which women writers were informed by and influenced fellow authors, traditional interpretive frameworks became increasingly redundant. Simultaneously, the interrogation of these critical paradigms urged a more inclusive approach to print culture that might accommodate the manifold interventions made by women in the literary and cultural marketplaces. Norma Clarke's and Betty A. Schellenberg's studies of the professional careers of eighteenth-century women writers are openly indebted to the invaluable body of scholarship that precedes them. Both works reinforce critical scepticism of the public-private model and draw on the growing and fascinating body of work on gender, print culture, and authorship that has emerged in the studies of George Justice, Paula McDowell, Sarah Prescott, and Clifford Siskin, among others. Their collective [End Page 391] strength, however, lies in the timely and compelling cases they make for a reevaluation of the terms in which feminist criticism has negotiated women's place in eighteenth-century studies. Norma Clarke's joyfully readable Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters—a work which envisages a wider readership than Schellenberg's study—offers lively accounts of the diverse career trajectories of a number of women writers from Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn to Anna Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft. The biographical details of many (but surely not all) of these women will be known to more enthusiastic scholars of women's writing. However, the strength of Clarke's descriptions lies not simply in the telling but in the skillful way that biographical details are accumulated in the patient building of the book's central argument. While attentive to those fascinating details that defy efforts to reduce these women to certain identifiable "types," Clarke nonetheless argues that a reading of the careers of female authors from the Restoration to Romanticism confirms a single, depressing truth: that the woman writer rose with the reinstitution of monarchical rule in 1660, only for her to fall from grace with "the beginnings of democracy and the undermining of a system based on deference" (3). Clarke's thesis is not an entirely new one. Clifford Siskin's The Work of Writing (1998)—although not a work to which Clarke refers directly—similarly argued that the turn of the nineteenth century witnessed a systematic writing out—or "Great Forgetting"—of women writers by the new institutions of criticism that sought to masculinize the literary by privileging subjects traditionally gendered male such as economics and politics and marking out female-authored literature as the amateur "other" against which the preoccupations of the professional man of letters were defined. But despite its title, Clarke's work, in fact, corrects as much as it concurs with Siskin's account. In the first and possibly finest chapter of the book, Clarke offers a much-needed reassessment of the career and correspondence of Anna Seward. Taking advantage of her liberal upbringing—her father Thomas Seward was the author of the 1748 poem "The Female Right to Literature"—and the intellectual circle that gathered in her native Lichfield, the Seward who emerges here is a woman...

Examining the traits of the female characters offered by a number of prominent women writers in a specific space-time interval of civilisation contributes to identifying the potential relations between the female characters created by women writers and the literary tradition, the historical context and the mentality of an era, which in this case characterise post-Unification Italy and the first decades of the 20th century. Given the distinctive historical and cultural environment in which the Italian women writers of those decades were active, and based on the dichotomous representation of women (“the woman-angel” figure vs the “femme fatale”) in literature, an overview of their experience from the perspective of the “women’s question”, inextricably linked to the “social question”, is presented. In the post-Unification period, writing provided an opportunity for Italian women authors to rethink, and not only from a literary angle, women’s role in the newly-formed society. Through the study of a select group of women writers, an attempt is made to provide a picture of what can be defined as “the Italian interpretation of emancipation and ‛feminism’.” Although there was a small group of women authors who were not afraid to overtly fight for the “women’s question”, demanding for their fellow countrywomen the right to civic engagement in the making of the “new Italy”, in most cases women writers favoured taking, at least outwardly, more conservative stances, only to then present authorial choices that make one wonder whether they had not decided to challenge the system from within.

ABSTRACTThis article considers the impact of the digital turn on feminist efforts to restore value to women's literature of past centuries, and positions the Digital Mitford project as a next step in site-specific excavation following the large-scale surveys of women writers of the Orlando Project and the Women Writers Project. The Digital Mitford departs from these earlier projects by concentrating on an influential and prolific yet non-canonical woman writer who would otherwise garner only passing selective treatment in digital survey work. The very problem of Mary Russell Mitford's literary success over multiple decades and genres has led to a faulty collective memory of her that is fragmented along Romantic vs. Victorian period boundaries in literary studies. To redress this memory loss, the Digital Mitford team has initiated a network analysis study drawn from its TEI XML markup to call attention to the literary and historical figures together with the publications Mitford wrote about frequently in the same paragraphs. The article features a view of Mitford’s literary and social network centered on her references to her canonical contemporary Jane Austen, to demonstrate how the excavation of a single woman writer may help to open new areas of research to literary historians.

The article is devoted to researching the work of N. Romanovych-Tkachenko, a representative of the generation of female writers of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s, from the perspective of gender discourse. Women's literature of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s-1930s is an understudied and not updated phenomenon of the Ukrainian literary process of that time. Most of the texts of women writers were unnoticed by literary critics, and the problems that were raised in their texts turned out to be "uninteresting" for the then, generally male, literary critics. Instead, we note the emergence of a new generation of women writers in Ukrainian literature, formed not only by the national tradition, but also by the first wave of European feminism. They radicalize the women's issue and put forward other, unlike their predecessors, aesthetic demands on artistic texts. At the same time, it was women writers who continued the traditions of modern Ukrainian literature, in particular bright individual writing. Most of them told the reader about their biographies for the first time in the form of memories, diaries, memoirs. The peculiarity of these biographies is that they reveal a striking discrepancy between the expectations of women from the gender policy of the Bolsheviks and the revolutionary, post-revolutionary reality. We can see two biographies of the writer by comparing the artistic texts and autobiographical memories of N. Romanovych-Tkachenko. One of them is imaginary, constructed by the author on the basis of her own life project, and the second is real, as the writer lived. These two biographies in different genre forms are presented in the writer's work. Imaginary biography is described in the experience of the characters of fictional texts, while real biography is represented by the memoir genre, in particular, the diaries and memoirs of the author. The difference between these two life scenarios shaped the feminist outlook of N. Romnovich-Tkachenko and many other modern women writers.

This essay analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. Largely overlooked, this archival material is significant because it suggests a subtle yet significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but rather, it emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism, encompassing the overlapping projects of Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism. Thus, it becomes clear that first wave feminism, including white women writers, played a key but brief role in the formation of the middle class nationalism that would later dominate Jamaica's transition to independence. During the first five years of publication of the Jamaica Times, women wrote a significant proportion of the short stories published. However, they became marginalized as black folk culture became the defining symbol of national authenticity. The marginalization of middle class women writers reflects a broader pattern. In adopting first wave feminism from Britain and the United States, Jamaican nationalists reproduced colonial race and class dynamics that established an unbridgeable divide between middle class women, who served as ‘ladies bountiful,’ and the usually darker-skinned compatriots to whom they ministered. This class division continued to limit feminist activism in Jamaica throughout the first and second waves.

Reviewed by: Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction by Susan Watkins Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor Susan Watkins. Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ix +219 pp. Several days after September 11, 2001, Guardian critic James Wood commented on contemporary novels' attempts to contain the uncontainable through encyclopedic proportion. Wood proposed that hysterical realism overtook literary fiction at the turn of century, conjuring a picture of an emasculated generation of (male and female) storytellers, with a couple exceptions (such as Don Delillo), who just don't have it in them to respond adequately to the times. Wood took to task the then-first-time author Zadie Smith for falling into a characteristic evasiveness and lack of authentic feeling. In a [End Page 586] wry response entitled "This Is How It Feels to Me," Smith conceded that the millennial literary landscape is shadowed by fear and the realization that the center is not, in fact, holding. But after all, she averred, is it so irrational and weak-minded of a writer, particularly right after the apocalyptic event in New York, to feel (like everybody else) disoriented or untethered, fearful—even terrified? If the self-proliferating stylistics of her and others' novels targeted by Wood are some form of psycho-social defense, thanks to a general sense of approaching doom, what makes such self-conscious defensiveness inauthentic, or lacking in writerly craft and moral seriousness? Twenty years on, as Susan Watkins's Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction notes, the question of adequate response to the manifold anxieties attending the collapse of one world and the emergence of another remains. She cites Ursula Heise's observation that the prevalence of contemporary dystopias indicates a desire to "unsettle the status quo, but by failing to outline a persuasive alternative, they end up reconfirming it" (10). The suggestion of inauthenticity appears again: "survivalists [are] hard to tell apart from hipsters, their portrayals of apocalypse [recycling] well-known motifs" (Heise qtd. in Watkins 10). Watkins concurs to an extent but warns against extending critical skepticism onto today's postapocalyptic fiction, which comprises critical dystopian and utopian modes. An increasing number of women authors, less committed to the legacy of the heroic narrative and its sense of an ending, are leading the way. As Watkins states at the opening of her study, "conventional apocalyptic fiction (usually male-authored) tends toward conservatism" (1), toward a nostalgia for the time before, and/or a restoration of the world, centered around the nuclear family. Woman-authored novels in this genre, Watkins argues, go a different way—and they must: "My argument is not that women are bound to write end-of-world fiction in a particular way because they are intrinsically different from men . . . Rather, I claim that women writers' fictional engagement with apocalyptic ideas and forms is inevitably related to their specific subject positions in the contemporary moment" (2). In short, we are talking about a feminist standpoint. Feminist critical intervention has meant writing against the end, argues Watkins, "focus[ing] on analysing the ways in which patriarchy and neo-colonialism are intrinsically implicated in the disasters they envision. Rather than nostalgia and restoration . . . they successfully transform and rewrite the apocalyptic genre to imagine different possible futures for humanity post-apocalypse" (1). Feminist attention to situatedness and embodiment, gender and sexuality, crucially distinguishes women's [End Page 587] postapocalyptic fiction from men's, the author claims, and Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction lucidly articulates how women writers since Mary Shelley (especially her The Last Man [1826]) have interrogated apocalyptic and postapocalyptic narrative as symbolic form. Imbricated in this study of (un)anticipated endings and belated beginnings is the urgency of women's agency, not in driving the rebirth of mankind but rather in generating radical forms of difference that open up possibility or hope. A rich introductory chapter ("Rewriting and Transforming Traditions") gathers the threads of feminist literary and philosophical critiques by Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Heise, Melanie Klein, Adrienne Rich, and others who have remarked on the absence of intersectional analysis that feminist and postcolonial writers and scholars bring to bear. Watkins also situates her monograph...

Jeannine Blackwell Anonym, verschollen, trivial: Methodological Hindrances in Researching German Women's Literature Frauenliteratur, like the terms Frauenroman and Frauendichtung, is a two-way mirror. It is a distressing reminder of the impotent and flowery sentimentality of Wilhelminian German literature: garden dwarfs, the Gartenlaube, tüchtige Hausfrauen, Hedwig CourthsMahler , and Vicki Baum. It is harmless literature, to be classified next to the children's stories, the codebooks , and home improvements. Yet with this term Frauenliteratur , as with so many, there is a cutting edge. Is Frauenliteratur really what Treitschke and Goedeke tell us it is? Is it not also the letters Caroline and Dorothea wrote, Bettina's Armenbuch, Gabriele Reuter's social protest? Were not these also by, for, and about women in Germany? To discover what Frauenliteratur was and is, scholars today must look through that dark, distorting mirror of literary history. Anticipating and identifying the cracks in that history, feminist critics must reshape the critical tools to deal with the anonymous, the unrecognized, the uncanonized, the "trivial"; to reconstruct or rediscover the verschollen ; and to locate and describe the dear ladies who read the books back then. The other side of the cracked mirror of literary history is Frauenliteratur today. It is the product of contemporary critical female authors for a predominantly female audience; it is also the reestablished or discovered tradition of women authors such as Sidonie Zäunemann (1714-1740), Thérèse Huber (1764-1829), and Gertrud Kolmar (1894-1943?). Often a literature of the "other Germany" -- critical, republican, socialist, Utopian, or feminist -- it is not harmless, impotent droolings. This excavation work brings out the straightforward , graphic, even aggressive side of German women 's literary culture. This research has grown out of the second women's movement in both Europe and the United States. Its new female mentality, new consciousness of history and the private sphere demand a fresh reading of the old texts. In this reading, feminists cannot rely trustingly on that cracked mirror of German literary history. We must reread everything and question the verity of every fact already given. 39 The great reference works of the nineteenth century are some of the most important tools we have to reconstruct that literature. Knowing the history of these works will give feminist scholars today an idea of how Frauenliteratur was defined, which pieces were included, and which were omitted. Õ brief examination of the process of literary analysis in Germany will underscore the pitfalls of such reference works. These massive undertakings must be checked for factual error, but more importantly, they must be seen in conjunction with and contrast to the movements of social and political change within the German area. The establishment of modern German universities, under the leadership of the brothers Grimm and Humboldt, brought in a model of scholarly research which became paradigmatic for Germanistik as well as for the natural sciences. The unguistisch-literaturwissenschaftliche method of philological research, RTstorical dating, biographical data, study of origins and development started by the collections of Herder and the brothers Grimm put literature first into its historical context, and then into national and linguistic groupings; its authorial origins were sought out if possible. Criticism was no longer merely aesthetic, moral, and philosophical, but rather historical. With this group of scholars and with the establishment of new universities at Berlin, Göttingen, and elsewhere, the separation of the writing scholar and the artistic scholar was completed. While it had been customary up to the eighteenth century for the two fields to be combined -- one thinks here of Opitz, later Lessing, Herder, and Wieland, who wrote both scholarly treatises and creative works -- this era brings about the division and professionalization of poet and scholar. The division of labor between the Gelehrten and the Dichter that prevailed after the late 18th century was a boon to women authors. Since they had been and continued to be excluded from university study (with a few loudly proclaimed exceptions) and had little opportunity to learn the classics or consistent orthography, they had been essentially shut out from literary production. The new division of literary labor, combined with the spiritual justification of women's literary forms in Pietist confessional literature, changed that...

The Jews of Iran: The History, Religion, and Culture of a Community in the Islamic World

In February 2005, an article appeared in the Boston Globe asserting that census records list as white the author of two novels published in the Schomburg Collection of African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Jackson). The genealogical work reported in the Globe turned out be sound. Yet the researcher's not quite subtle interpretation of nineteenth-century Black writing, the repeated implication that she had solved the mystery of why Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins's literature never fit with contemporaneous texts and themes (par. 4), and the popular press's eager unveiling of Kelley-Hawkins's racial mis/classification raised larger questions about nineteenth-century women and racial identity, identification, and indeterminacy. In response the new revelations, some reporters and critics have suggested that Kelley-Hawkins's work will be--and deserves be--reforgotten (McLemee, par. 2). (1) Such reviviscent insinuations recall the politics of disavowal and dismissal that are part of the reception history of nineteenth-century women's literary production. Indeed, this opposition women's putative concerns and the popular literary styles women often adopted undergirded the justifications for preserving almost exclusively male literary canons until civil and women's rights movements took root in the publishing and academic worlds of the early 1970s. Since then, more and more early Black women's writing has been recovered and reprinted. As it continues help desegregate literary canons and be placed in continually augmented historical contexts and evolving interpretative frameworks, scholars face the challenges of partial recovery and responsible speculation that are the necessary genesis of our work. It is worth recalling that our understandings of now-canonical authors such as Harriet A. Jacobs, Harriet E. Wilson, and Frances E. W. Harper, for example, have significantly evolved in the last decade as scholars have built on partial discoveries introduce new information--and whole new bodies (of work)--that inform our understanding of the period and the received paradigms that act as its scholarly prism. (2) Until 2005, Kelley-Hawkins belonged a group of authors identified as African American despite the partial or inconclusive information about their racial identity and identification. For example, despite the best-selling (twenty-first century) status of The Bondwoman's Narrative, this date, the work of some of the most noted scholars and highly skilled genealogists has yielded no definitive information confirm its author's racial identity (Andrews and Kachun, Editors' Introduction xxxviii). And although, as Daphne A. Brooks reminds us, the ethnographic facts about the wildly popular stage performer Adah Isaacs Menken and her personal life have largely remained a source of occlusion and contention (134), Menken's work, like Kelley-Hawkins's, is included in the Schomburg collection. The public attention and assumptions eddying around Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins's reclassification provide an invitation for specialists in the field revisit and reframe some of the organizing themes and tropes that have come be associated with the nineteenth century: racial protest and racial uplift, passing, and the figure of the (tragic) mulatta. As Brooks puts it, such lingering controversies about race and cultural iconography force us to scrutinize critical methods for defining race and the tools that we use measure and evaluate its social and political worth and cultural authenticity (135). In this issue of Legacy, examinations of Kelley-Hawkins's work appear alongside essays that also place their analyses of forgotten, misplaced, and marginalized texts within the larger scope of nineteenth-century writing, recovery, and reception. From this vantage point, readers can reconsider the evolving politics of nineteenth-century African American canon formation, reassess how we evaluate racial evidence and authenticity, and rethink how and why racial identity, identification, and indeterminacy matter. …

Janet Frame's A State of Siege was published in 1966. In both style and theme, the novel was ahead of its time. Its style remains a challenge to today's students, and the feminist overtones of Frame's tale, dealing as it does with a middle-aged woman-Malfred Signal-breaking free of family and job to pursue her art, might at first glance seem dated to a generation in which have seemingly made such gains in opportunities in education and career. Yet so often remain primary caretakers when family members need help, like Malfred, and so many careers, like the teaching job from which Malfred retires in A State of Siege, remain female-identified. mysterious way in which Malfred dies allows speculation as to what finally defeats her. novel, rooted in so many realistic details, at the same time contains allegorical elements that allow students to speculate about the persistence of expectations for dictated by gender, as well as reasons for violence against women. novel would work in many classes from Women in Literature, to the Female Gothic, Zealand Literature, and Modernism (or the Lyrical Novel). Even paired with such novels as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), Frame's novel holds its own. Because of limitations of space, will concentrate on a comparison between A State of Siege and To the Lighthouse, though will mention other works, including films, to provide resources that may prove helpful in teaching a range of classes.There are many similarities between Woolf's novel and Frame's. Each novel features a middle-aged female painter who is looked down upon by other characters, and each novel can be viewed as a tribute to the author's mother-until she wrote To the Lighthouse Woolf said her mother's memory obsessed her (Sketch 80); Frame's mother died before she wrote her novel, but her mentor Frank Sargeson forbade her to speak of the death, according to biographer Michael King (135-36). Each novel employs stylistic experimentation and is divided into three parts. In A State of Siege the parts are The Knocking, Darkness, and The Stone. In To the Lighthouse the parts are The Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse. In Woolf's novel, World War intervenes in the action and scars the characters; in Frame's, it is World War II that alters Malfred's life. Ironically, in some ways the earlier novel, To the Lighthouse, could be seen as presenting the most successfully liberated female artist in that Lily Briscoe finishes her painting at the end of the novel, declaring, I have had my vision (310), whereas the deadly assault on Malfred Signal begins the night of the day she finishes her painting, and her painting is not even of her sought-after New View. Both Woolf and Frame were also institutionalized numerous times in their lives. Frame may never have suffered from any mental illness beyond anxiety and depression (though she received both insulin shock treatments and electroshock). Woolf was diagnosed as schizophrenic, but Frame was found by one doctor not to be suffering schizophrenia at all (King 197). More than once, Frame's linguistic flights of fancy were misinterpreted as madness for which she was institutionalized and treated.In fact, part of the difficulty of both A State of Siege and To the Lighthouse comes from the fact that both novels are stylistic tours de force that show that relate to in a different way than men do. As Annette Kolodny points out, women writers, coming into a tradition of literary and conventional forms already appropriated, for centuries, to the purposes of male expression, will be forced virtually to 'wrestle' with that language (6) in order 'to remake it as a adequate to our conceptual processes' (Stanley and Robbins, qtd. in Kolodny 6). By the end of Frame's work, a piece of nonsense verse has pride of place, demonstrating the break from based on the Name of the Father, as Jacques Lacan would say. …

Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks foUow their 1995 anthology, Southern Women's Writing: Colonial to Contemporary, with Uterary history. Much more than valuable compendium of information on southern women writ ers from EUza Lucas Pinckney (writing in the eighteenth century) to Kaye Gibbons, The History oj Southern Women's Literature offers its readers new ways to think about southern Uterary history, chaUenging conventional periodiza tion, movements, and themes that have come to be generaUy accepted as defining the field. The local color movement of the late nineteenth century, for example, achieves level of significance in the hands of these essayists that it does not have in traditional histories centered on the work of white male writers. And Perry and Weaks take Carol S. Manning up on the chaUenge she makes to conventional periodization in The Female Tradition in Southern Lit erature (1993) by estabUshing the beginning of the Southern Renaissance in 1900, move that recovers number of women writers who have been mar ginaUzed by conventional male-centered Uterary histories in which the South ern Renaissance begins after World War I. Later in the volume Linda T?te identifies a second southern renaissance ... far more robust and diverse than