The First Woman in the Republic

by Karcher, Carolyn L.

• ISBN13: 9780822314851
• ISBN10: 0822314851
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1995-01-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

For half a century Lydia Maria Child was a household name in the United States. Hardly a sphere of nineteenth-century life can be found in which Lydia Maria Child did not figure prominently as a pathbreaker. Although best known today for having edited Harriet A. Jacobs's "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," she pioneered almost every department of nineteenth-century American letters--the historical novel, the short story, children's literature, the domestic advice book, women's history, antislavery fiction, journalism, and the literature of aging. Offering a panoramic view of a nation and culture in flux, this innovative cultural biography (originally published by Duke University Press in 1994) recreates the world as well as the life of a major nineteenth-figure whose career as a writer and social reformer encompassed issues central to American history.

Author Biography

Carolyn L. Karcher is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Temple University.

Table of Contents

Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgments

Chronology

Abbreviations

Prologue: A Passion for Books

The Author of Hobomok

Rebels and "Rivals": Self Portraits of a Conflicted Young Artist

The Juvenile Miscellany: The Creation of an American Children's Literature

A Marriage of True Minds: Espousing the Indian Cause

Blighted Prospects: Indian Fiction and Domestic Reality

The Frugal Housewife: Financial Worries and Domestic Advice

Children's Literature and Antislavery: Conservative Medium, Radical Message

"The First Woman in the Republic": An Antislavery Baptism

An Antislavery Marriage: Careers at Cross Purposes

The Conditions of Women: Double Binds, Unresolved Conflicts

Schisms, Personal and Political

The National Anti-Slavery Standard: Family Newspaper or Factional Organ?

Letters from New York: The Invention of a New Literary Genre

Sexuality and Marriage in Fact and Fiction

The Progress of Religious Ideas: A "Pilgrimage of Pennance"

Autumnal Leaves: Reconsecrated Partnerships, Personal and Political

The Example of John Brown

Child's Civil War

Visions of a Reconstructed America: The Freedmen's Book and A Romance of the Republic

A Radical Old Age

Aspirations of the World

Afterword

Notes

Works of Lydia Maria Child

Index

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