The Artistry of Anger

by Grasso, Linda M.

• ISBN13: 9780807853481
• ISBN10: 0807853488
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

In this compelling interdisciplinary study, Linda Grasso demonstrates that using anger as a mode of analysis and the basis of an aesthetic transforms our understanding of American women's literary history. Exploring how black and white nineteenth-century women writers defined, expressed, and dramatized anger, Grasso reconceptualizes antebellum women's writing and illuminates an unrecognized tradition of discontent in American literature. She maintains that two equally powerful forces shaped this tradition: women's anger at their exclusion from the democratic promise of America, and the cultural prohibition against its public articulation.Grasso challenges the common notion that nineteenth-century women's writing is confined to domestic themes and shows instead how women channeled their anger into art that addresses complex political issues such as slavery, nation-building, gender arrangements, and race relations. Cutting across racial and genre boundaries, she considers works by Lydia Maria Child, Maria W. Stewart, Fanny Fern, and Harriet Wilson as superb examples of the artistry of angry expression. Transforming their anger through literary imagination, these writers bequeathed their vision of an alternative America both to their contemporaries and to subsequent generations.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Part One. The Anger Paradigm: Theories and Contexts
Anger as Analysis and Aesthetic in American Women's Literature	3	(16)
Using the Anger Paradigm: The Antebellum Period as Case Study	19	(22)
Suppressing Treasonous Anger: Nation-Building and Gendered Ideologies of Anger in Antebellum America	41	(30)
Part Two. Anger in the House and in the Text: Four Case Studies
Anger, Exile, and Restitution in Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok	71	(30)
Maria W. Stewart's Inspired Wrath	101	(34)
Masking Anger as it is Spoken: Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall	135	(28)
The Text as Courtroom: Judgement, Vengeance, and Punishment in Harriet Wilson's Our Nig	163	(30)
Conclusion: Making Sure the Anger Holds	193	(4)
Notes	197	(22)
Bibliography	219	(20)
Index	239