The forgotten female aesthetes

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Jonathan H. Grossman

"In The Art of Alibi, Jonathan H. Grossman reconstructs the relation of the novel to nineteenth-century law courts. During the Romantic era, courthouses and trial scenes frequently found their way into the plots of English novels. As Grossman states, "by the Victorian period, theses scenes represented a powerful intersection of narrative form with a complementary and competing structure for storytelling." He argues that the courts, newly fashioned as a site in which to orchestrate voices and reconstruct stories, arose as a cultural presence influencing the shape of the English novel.". "Weaving examinations of novels such as William Godwin's Caleb Williams, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Charles Dicknens's The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, along with a reading of the new Royal Courts of Justice, Grossman charts the exciting changes occurring within the novel, especially crime fiction, that preceded and led to the invention of the detective mystery in the 1840s."--BOOK JACKET.

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Kristin Boudreau

"In this chronicle of the role of sympathy in American literature and culture from the colonial period to the Gilded Age, Boudreau shows how the sentiment of fellow-feeling was repeatedly recruited at moments of national and personal crisis.". "Unlike many treatments of attachment and sentimentality, this book avoids positing either the radical or the conservative account of sympathy. Drawing on a range of texts from John Winthrop's 1630 "Model of Christian Charity" to William James's 1902 Varieties of Religious Experience, the work explores the entire complicated legacy of sympathy in American culture. In examining what she calls the "cultural fiction" of consanguinity, or shared blood, the author illuminates both its possibilities for soothing social and political divisions as well as its social and psychological costs. In one of the few books to trace the influence of writers of the Early Republic on antebellum sentimental works, Boudreau offers an array of examples from inside and outside the canon to illustrate that sentimental culture did not end with the Civil War."--BOOK JACKET.

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John Sutherland

In Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (well, is he?) John Sutherland investigates thirty-four conundrums of nineteenth-century fiction. Applying these 'real world' questions to fiction is not in any sense intended to catch out the novelists who are invariably cleverer than their most defectively inclined readers. Typically, one finds a reason for the seeming anomaly. Not blunders, that is, but unexpected felicities and ingenious justifications. In Is Heathcliff a Murderer? John Sutherland, recently described by Tony Tanner as 'a sort of Sherlock Holmes of literature', pays homage to the most rewarding of critical activities, close reading and the pleasures of good-natured pedantry.

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Laura Hapke

Record numbers of women began entering the American labor force in the late 1800s, their experiences composed largely of the drudgery of the factory or the monotony of the sales floor. This feminine mass entry into the workplace sparked thirty-five years of debate, with proponents protesting employers' "moral corruption" of women and detractors arguing for a return to woman's "proper" sphere, the home - evidence of the late-Victorian desire to regulate female sexuality. Authors of fiction were quick to respond: Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, Anzia Yezierska - these and others portrayed working girls in forms as diverse as tenement tales, labor romances, and novels of upward mobility. By joining the period debate about the working girl, her literary imaginers helped shape it. While modern treatments of labor fiction, including those by feminist scholars, have largely ignored these portrayals, Tales of the. Working' Girl does not. Reevaluating both well-known and forgotten texts, this new study by Laura Hapke examines the myriad ways in which the working girl was envisioned by considering the artistic goals and strategies of those who depicted her. Hapke explores to what extent writers acknowledged women's own responses to the controversy, scrutinizes differences in male and female authors' portrayals, and traces the evolution of the working girl as fictional heroine from. The slum melodramas of the 1890s to the strike fiction of the 1910s to the economic ascension novels of the 1920s. Marked by lucid prose and graced by historical photographs and illustrations, Tales of the Working Girl is an important contribution to women's studies, American studies, and labor history.