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American Women’s Writing of the Nineteenth Century

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Course title: American Women’s Writing of the Nineteenth Century  (A, 19. st.)

Instructor: Dr. Jelena Šesnić

Fall 2022/23

Mon, 8:45-9:30 (A-105)

Wed, 10:15-11:45 (A-105)

E-mail: jsesnic@ffzg.hr

Phone: 01-4092060

Office: B-018

Office hours: Mon, 12:30-13:30 p.m.; Thur, 10-11 a.m.

Course requirements: Regular attendance, assignments 20%; seminar paper (6-7 pp, ca 2500 words; MLA) 30 %; continuous evaluation (a mid-term  and a final test) 50%.

Course description: The course is an overview of representative texts by and about women in nineteenth-century America. In order better to contextualize the texts, we shall be looking at two earlier traditions informing writing by women that are mutually compatible rather than exclusionary. The one is represented by Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and situates a woman at the center of the project of nation-building, while the other is exemplified by Rowson’s hugely popular sentimental/ seduction novel, from which the novel writing in the States takes off. Thus the feminine tradition appears to be crucial from the very beginning for the ways the American nation describes and represents itself. This argument, however, becomes possible only in the wake of the strong intervention into the field of literary history and literary canon formation enacted by feminist, poststructuralist, new historicist, and cultural critics from the 1970s onwards.

Required reading:

Novels/ narratives

  1. Mary Rowlandson: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682)
  2. Susanna Rowson: Charlotte Temple (1791)
  3. Lydia Maria Child: Hobomok (1824)
  4. Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl (1861)
  5. Louisa May Alcott: Work: A Story of Experience (1873)
  6. Frances Harper: Iola Leroy (1893)

Syllabus (alterations possible):

  1. General introduction. Introduction to Rowlandson.
  2. Analysis of cultural, political, ethical, and gendered implications of Rowlandson’s captivity
  3. Rowson’s novel as a representative and generative instance of the sentimental/ seduction novel
  4. Rowson, cont.
  5. L.M. Child’s Hobomok and the idea of cultural nationalism
  6. Child, cont.
  7. Midterm.
  8. Jacobs’s text in between the domestic, sentimental and seduction novels and the representative masculine slave narratives
  9. Jacobs, cont.
  10. Alcott’s Work as a story of women’s emergence in the public sphere in a transforming society
  11. Alcott, cont.
  12. Harper’s Iola Leroy and the post-slavery, post-Reconstruction America
  13. Harper, cont.
  14. Final test. Course evaluation.

 

Secondary literature (required):

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood : The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. (selection)

Castiglia, Christopher. Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White

Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Chicago, London: The U of Chicago P, 1996. (selection)

Elbert, Sarah. „Introduction.“ Work: A Story of Experience by Louisa May Alcott. Shocken Books: New York, 1977. Ix- xliv.

Goddu, Teresa. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP,

  1. (selection)

Grasso, Linda. The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature in America, 1820-1860. Chapel Hill, London: The U of North Carolina P, 2002. (selection)

Hendler, Glenn. Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Chapel Hill, London: The U of North Carolina P, 2001. (selection)

Howard, June. „What Is Sentimentality?“ American Literary History 11.1 (Spring 1990): 63-

81.

Nelson, Dana. The Word in Black and White: Reading ‘Race’ in American Literature, 1638-1867. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. (selection)

Schloss, Dietmar. “Republicanism and Politeness in the Early American Novel”. Early America Re-Explored: Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture. Eds. Fritz Fleischmann and Klaus H. Schmidt. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 269-90.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: the Mythology of the American

Frontier, 1600-1800, Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1973. (selection)

Welter, Barbara. „The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860“. 1966. Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline. Ed. Lucy Maddox. Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. 43-70.