Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition

Front Cover......Page 1
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Dedication......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
The Conversation of “The Whole Family”: Gender, Politics, and Aesthetics in Literary Tradition......Page 14
Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick: A Dialogue on Race, Culture, and Gender......Page 40
Reconstructing Literary Genealogies: Frances E. W. Harper’s and William Dean Howells’s Race Novels......Page 61
Was Tom White? Stowe’s Dred and Twain’s Pudd\'nhead Wilson......Page 80
Shaped by Readers: The Slave Narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs......Page 95
Body Politics and the Body Politic in William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig......Page 112
Wild Semantics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Feminization of Edgar Allan Poe’s Arabesque Aesthetics......Page 136
Deepening Hues to Local Color: George Washington Cable and Sarah Barnwell Elliott......Page 154
Sister Carrie and The Awakening: The Clothed, the Unclothed, and the Woman Undone......Page 180
Ladies Prefer Bonds: Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and the Money Novel......Page 197
Mining the West: Bret Harte and Mary Hallock Foote......Page 215
My Banker and I Can Afford to Laugh! Class and Gender in Fanny Fern and Nathaniel Hawthorne......Page 232
Body/Rituals: The (Homo)Erotics of Death in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Terry Cooke, and Edgar Allan Poe......Page 252
The Five Million Women of My Race: Negotiations of Gender in W. E. B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper......Page 275
Woman Thinking: Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the American Scholar......Page 294
How Conscious Could Consciousness Grow? Emily Dickinson and William James......Page 319
Contributors......Page 346
Index......Page 350