Description
Book SynopsisLori Merish establishes working-class women as significant actors within nineteenth-century U.S. literary culture by analyzing previously unexplored archives of working-class women's literature, showing how white, African American, and Mexican American factory workers, seamstresses, domestic workers, and prostitutes understood themselves while forging class identity.
Trade Review"[
Archives of Labor] is a remarkable feat of original research and suggests routes for further study – not least on formal innovation and tone in antebellum literature." -- Stephanie Kelley * TLS *
"In the depth and range of her arguments, as well as in the important questions about methodology that her work implicitly raises, Merish opens up new debates and issues for feminist working-class recovery projects in the antebellum period and beyond it. . . . Future scholars and activists can build on Merish’s imaginative and resourceful study." -- Francesca Sawaya * American Literary History *
“
Archives of Labor is a marvel of archival recovery. Exploring many previously unknown and understudied texts, Merish focused not just on novels and poetry, but also on radical labor periodicals, pamphlet novels, periodical literature, theatrical melodrama, the testimonios of Mexican mission workers, and other literary ephemera. . . . An important interdisciplinary contribution to feminist history and literary scholarship.” -- Ana Stevenson * Australasian Journal of American Studies *
"Powerful, groundbreaking. . . .
Archives of Labor makes an important and decisive contribution to the vocabulary of class in American literary studies." -- Andrew Lawson * Legacy *
"Exciting . . . Lori Merish has written a book about how feminists, scholars, and workers can commemorate their own struggles for emancipation by giving gendered particularity to memory itself." -- Bill V. Mullen * Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature *
"Lori Merish’s
Archives of Labor offers a nuanced and thoroughly researched analysis of antebellum American working-class women’s engagement with literary culture. . . .
Archives of Labor is a remarkable book that merits the close attention of historians and literary scholars alike, both for its argument and its methods." -- Susan M. Ryan * Journal of the Early Republic *
"The book’s broad literary scope is one of its truly great pleasures. . . . Merish anchors her brilliant analyses of these works in the often paradoxical, critical challenges which these women leveled against the 'romance' of labor, the 'moralization' and sentimental eroticizing of 'virtuous' seamstresses, and the middleclass privatizing of sympathy and domesticity." -- Xiomara Santamarina * Nineteenth-Century Contexts *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Factory Fictions: Lowell Mill Women and the Romance of Labor 33
2. Factory Labor and Literary Aesthetics: The Lowell Mill Girl, Popular Fiction, and the Proletarian Grotesque 73
3. Narrating Female Dependency: The Sentimental Seamstress and the Erotics of Labor Reform 113
4. Harriet Wilson's
Our Nig and the Labor of Race 153
5. Hidden Hands: E.D.E.N. Southworth and Working-Class Performance 180
6. Writing Mexicana Workers: Race, Labor, and the Western Front 219
Postscript. Looking for Antebellum Workingwomen 247
Notes 251
Works Cited 285
Index 303
