[Dorri Beam] Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture) (pdf){Zzzzz}[BЯ]

Dorri Beam presents an important contribution to nineteenth-century fiction by examining how and why a florid and sensuous style came to be adopted by so many authors. Discussing a diverse range of authors, including Margaret Fuller and Pauline Hopkins, Beam traces this style through a variety of literary endeavors and reconstructs the political rationale behind the writers' commitments to this form of prose. Beam provides both close readings of a number of familiar and unfamiliar works and an overarching account of the importance of this form of writing, suggesting new ways of looking at style as a medium through which gender can be signified and reshaped. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth Century American Women's Writing redefines our understanding of women's relation to aesthetics and their contribution to both American literary romanticism and feminist reform. This illuminating account provides valuable new insights for scholars of American literature and women's writing.

Editorial Reviews
Review
"The case Beam makes is long overdue; her focus on ornamentation, profusion, and elaboration is utterly refreshing. She asks innovative questions about women's writing that yield new and unexpected interpretive possibilities. . . . this is an unusual and energizing study, grounded firmly in close readings and historical sources. It significantly advances our understanding of women's writing by asking us to 'learn to read in a forgotten mode.'"
--Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

"With brilliant discussions of highly wrought style in women writers such as Fuller, Spofford, Pauline Hopkins, and lesser known figures such as Ann Stephens, Beam has given us a remarkable new lens through which to appreciate female literary achievement anew. Moreover, she has given us a new critical language, a fresh and newly informed means of responding to the heady aesthetic experiments in nineteenth-century American women's writing."
--College Literature

"In Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing, Dorri Beam makes a significant contribution to the study of ornament and aesthetic excess in American women's writing of the nineteenth century. Through close textual analysis of both familiar and unfamiliar works by such authors as Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Margaret Sweat, Mary Clemmer, Edith Wharton, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Pauline Hopkins, Beam passionately explores a new type of feminine poetics, which she terms "highly wrought style," within the canonical literary romanticism and in so doing moves this conventionally marginal type of writing into the realm of scholarly consideration."
--American Literary Realism
Book Description
Dorri Beam presents an important contribution to nineteenth-century fiction by examining writing which was characterized by its florid and sensuous style. This 2010 book provides both close readings of a number of familiar and unfamiliar works and an overarching account of the importance of this form of writing.

Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (July 12, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 052176968X
ISBN-13: 978-0521769686