Political Prayer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Petitioning Women
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-032-67557-2
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 242 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 507 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature

Political Prayer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature explores how American women writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Emily Dickinson translated petitioning – a political form for redress of grievances with religious resonance, or what Strand calls “political prayer” – in their literary works. At a time when petitioning was historically transforming governments, mobilizing masses, and democratizing North America, these White women writers wrote “literary petitions” to advocate for others in social justice causes such as antiremoval, antislavery, and labor reform, to transform American literature and culture, and to articulate an ambivalent political agency. Political Prayer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature introduces historic petitioning into literary study as an overlooked but important new lens for reading nineteenth-century fiction and poetry. Understanding petitions in these literary works – and these literary works as petitions – also helps us to understand women’s political agency before their enfranchisement, to explain why scholars have long debated and inconsistently interpreted the works of well-anthologized women writers, and to see more clearly the multidimensional, coexisting, and often competing religious and political aspects of their writings.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Strand, Amy Dunham

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: “Stretching Out the Supplicating Hand”: Petitioning Women in 19th-Century America

Chapter One: Petitioning’s “Humble Story” in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s The Linwoods

Chapter Two: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Despairing Appeal”: Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Literary Petition

Chapter Three: “What Hope of Answer or Redress?”: Embodied Petitions in Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron-Mills

Chapter Four: Poetic Petitions: Emily Dickinson’s “Letters to the World”

Coda

Über Autor(innen)

Amy Dunham Strand is Associate Professor and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.