Description
Book SynopsisWith 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. From School to Salon responds to this glaring gap. Mary Loeffelholz presents the work of nineteenth
Trade Review"This groundbreaking study will no doubt prove influential in shaping critical discourse to come."--Faith Barrett, Legacy "From School to Salon is exemplary in the clarity with which it both furnishes neglected poets with layered cultural contexts and puts them to use in patient, level-headed unteasings of individual poems... [The book] is full of shrewd, timely judgments and riveting acts of attention."--Debra Fried, New England Quarterly
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: The Objects of Recovery 1 I. Prodigy and Teacher; or, Poetry in the Domestic-Tutelary Complex 11 Chapter One: Who Killed Lucretia Davidson? 13 Chapter Two: The School of Lydia Sigourney 32 II. Lessons of the Sphinx: Poetry and Cultural Capital in Abolition and Reconstruction 65 Chapter Three: Poetry, Slavery, Personification: Maria Lowell's "Africa" 67 Chapter Four: A Difference in the Vernacular: The Reconstruction Poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper 94 III. The Conquest of Autonomy 129 Chapter Five: "Plied from Nought to Nought": Helen Hunt Jackson and the Field of Emily Dickinson's Refusals 131 Chapter Six: Metropolitan Pastoral: The Salon Poetry of Annie Fields 162 Conclusion: The Sentiments of Recovery: Adrienne Rich and Nineteenth-Century Women's Culture 192 Notes 209 Index 267
