Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism.
Title:
Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism.
Author:
Argersinger, Jana L.
ISBN:
9780820346977
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (449 pages)
Contents:
Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Primary Interludes -- Acknowledgments -- List of Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Texts -- Introduction -- SECTION 1 Early Voices, Origins, Influences -- "Let me do nothing smale": Mary Moody Emerson and Women's "Talking" Manuscripts -- "With the Eyes That Are Given Me": Early Transcendentalism and Feminist Colonial Poetics in Sophia Peabody's Cuba Journal -- Fuller, Goethe, Bettine: Cultural Transfer and Imagined German Womanhood -- What Did Margaret Think of George? -- Elizabeth Peabody in the Nineteenth Century: Autobiographical Perspectives -- SECTION 2 Transcendentalist Circles -- "How It All Lies before Me To-day": Transcendentalist Women's Journeys into Attention -- "We have abolished domestic servitude": Women and Work at Brook Farm -- Sentimental Transcendentalism and Political Affect: Child and Fuller in New York -- (S)exchanges: Julia Ward Howe's The Hermaphrodite and the Gender Dialectics of Transcendentalism -- SECTION 3 Wider Circles of Vision and Action -- Green Exaltadas: Margaret Fuller, Transcendentalist Conservationism, and Antebellum Women's Nature Writing -- "Each Atomic Part": Edmonia Goodelle Highgate's African American Transcendentalism -- Caroline Healey Dall and the American Social Science Movement -- Transcendental Erotics, Same-Sex Desire, and Ethel's Love-Life -- SECTION 4 Late Voices and Legacies -- Required to "Speak": Caroline Healey Dall and the Defense of Margaret Fuller -- "A Woman's Place": The Transcendental Realism of Mary Wilkins Freeman -- Black Exaltadas: Race, Reform, and Spectacular Womanhood after Fuller -- The Cosmopolitan Project of Louisa May Alcott -- Selected Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index.
Abstract:
Traditional histories of the American transcendentalist movement begin in Ralph Waldo Emerson's terms: describing a rejection of college books and church pulpits in favor of the individual power of "Man Thinking." This essay collection asks how women who lacked the privileges of both college and clergy rose to thought. For them, reading alone and conversing together were the primary means of growth, necessarily in private and informal spaces both overlapping with those of the men and apart from them. But these were means to achieving literary, aesthetic, and political authority- indeed, to claiming utopian possibility for women as a whole. Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism is a project of both archaeology and reinterpretation. Many of its seventeen distinguished and rising scholars work from newly recovered archives, and all offer fresh readings of understudied topics and texts. First quickened by the 2010 bicentennial of Margaret Fuller's birth, the project reaches beyond Fuller to her female predecessors, contemporaries, and successors throughout the nineteenth century who contributed to or grew from the transcendentalist movement. Geographic scope also widens-from the New England base to national and transatlantic spheres. A shared goal is to understand this "genealogy" within a larger history of American women writers; no absolute boundaries divide idealism from sentiment, romantics from realists, or white discourse from black. Primary-text interludes invite readers into the ongoing task of discovering and interpreting transcendentally affiliated women. This collection recognizes the vibrant contributions women made to a major literary movement and will appeal to both scholars and general readers.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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