From School to Salon

by Loeffelholz, Mary

• ISBN13: 9780691049403
• ISBN10: 0691049408
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-07-19
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

With the transformation and expansion of the nineteenth-century American literary canon in the past two decades, the work of the era's American women poets has come to be widely anthologized. But scant scholarship has arisen to make full sense of it. FromSchool to Salonresponds to this glaring gap. Mary Loeffelholz presents the work of nineteenth-century women poets in the context of the history, culture, and politics of the times. She uses a series of case studies to discuss why the recovery of nineteenth-century women's poetry has been a process of anthologization without succeeding analysis. At the same time, she provides a much-needed account of the changing social contexts through which nineteenth-century American women became poets: initially by reading, reciting, writing, and publishing poetry in school, and later, by doing those same things in literary salons, institutions created by the high-culture movement of the day. Along the way, Loeffelholz provides detailed analyses of the poetry, much of which has received little or no recent critical attention. She focuses on the works of a remarkably diverse array of poets, including Lucretia Maria Davidson, Lydia Sigourney, Maria Lowell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Emily Dickinson, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Annie Fields. Impeccably researched and gracefully written,From School to Salonmoves the study of nineteenth-century women's poetry to a new and momentous level.

Author Biography

Mary Loeffelholz is Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University and the author of Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction
The Objects of Recovery	p. 1
Prodigy and Teacher; or, Poetry in the Domestic-Tutelary Complex	p. 11
Who Killed Lucretia Davidson?	p. 13
The School of Lydia Sigourney	p. 32
Lessons of the Sphinx: Poetry and Cultural Capital in Abolition and Reconstruction	p. 65
Poetry, Slavery, Personification	p. 67
A Difference in the Vernacular: The Reconstruction Poetry of Frances	p. 94
The Conquest of Autonomy	p. 129
"Plied from Nought to Nought"	p. 131
Metropolitan Pastoral: The Salon Poetry of Annie Fields	p. 162
Conclusion
The Sentiments of Recovery
Adrienne Rich and Nineteenth-Century Women's Culture	p. 192
Notes	p. 209
Index	p. 267
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