Plain speaking: American women writers and the periodical sketch form, 1820--1870.

摘要

This dissertation examines the development of the nineteenth-century periodical sketch in America, specifically exploring the ways that professional women writers employed this adaptable form to establish forceful public identities while still claiming allegiance to conventionally "feminine" social roles. Sketches---short prose pieces emphasizing character and scene rather than plot and argument---cross genre lines between autobiography, essay, and fiction. The women writers discussed in this study rejected the imaginative mode of the "fancy sketch" in favor of the realistic "life sketch," which is marked by straightforward prose, vivid detail and satiric wit. Adopting a participant-observer narrative stance, these female authors confidently asserted their right to speak freely on all subjects.;The first chapter introduces four writers who were among the first American women to modify the British village sketch and the masculine Western sketch, to create a form compatible with New World settings and non-male perspectives: Anne Newport Royall (1769--1854), Lydia Sigourney (1791--1865), Eliza Leslie (1787--1858) and Caroline Howard Gilman (1794--1819). The middle chapters examine community, travel and editorial sketches produced at the height of the periodical boom (1835--1857) by several of the era's most successful magazinists: Alice Cary (1820--1871); Grace Greenwood (Sara Jane Lippincott, 1823--1904); Caroline Kirkland (1801--1864); and Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis Parton, 1811--1872). The final chapter discusses Gail Hamilton (Mary Abigail Dodge, 1833--1896), an author who adapted the techniques of her plain-speaking predecessors to argue against developing critical standards that would exclude women writers and domestic subjects from the increasingly privileged realm of "realist" literature.;All these writers expressed an unconflicted female authorial identity rarely recorded in discussions of antebellum culture. The acceptance of assertive female-authored life sketches by contemporary audiences indicates that a philosophy advocating women's agency, public expression and community involvement was not out of keeping with prevailing nineteenth-century cultural ideals. (Re)placing these authors in American literary history affirms the significance and influence of early female editors; underscores the quality and variety of antebellum women's writing; asserts the primacy of periodical literature and non-fiction genres in mid-century print culture; and prompts a reconsideration of the origins of post-Civil War realism.