Kristen L. Renzi is Associate Professor of English at Xavier University.

"An eclectic study with evidence from various genres and periods, An Ethic of Innocence is unified by its groundbreaking focus on 'epistemic innocence' … Highly recommended." — CHOICE"An Ethic of Innocence recalibrates the critical landscape, revealing blind spots in contemporary models for thinking about knowledge and agency within a feminine context. The author builds a persuasive case from powerful close readings of texts, which invite readers to question their assumptions. I cannot now imagine the field of feminist modernist studies without the interventions of this project." — Barbara Green, author of Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture"This is a fascinating and very interesting intervention about the construction of knowledge/innocence within the field of literary studies. Anyone teaching or studying this period will find it of great use." — Stephanie A. Smith, author of Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Problem of Modern Female InnocencePart I. Negotiated Living 1. A Pragmatist’s Dilemma: The Collusion between Myth and Reality in the Tale of the Hull House Devil Baby2. Coming of Age via Critical Complaint: Reading Women’s Choices Not to Know in Realist Bildungsroman3. A Failure of Sympathy or of Narrative? Naturalism’s Jaded Women and the Narrative Cycle of Domestic Violence4. The Legacy of Naturalism, a Cycle of Leaving: Reading Agency in the Passive, Empty WomanPart II. Pragmatic Fantasies 5. Are Women People? Discourses of (Non)Personhood in Suffrage Poetry and Protest6. Making Women, Making Humans: Fantasies and Melancholic Mourning in Modern Sex Changes and Sex Losses7. Allowing Innocence? Belief, Knowledge, and the Modern CommunityNotesWorks CitedIndex

Kristen L. Renzi is Associate Professor of English at Xavier University.

"An eclectic study with evidence from various genres and periods, An Ethic of Innocence is unified by its groundbreaking focus on 'epistemic innocence' … Highly recommended." — CHOICE"An Ethic of Innocence recalibrates the critical landscape, revealing blind spots in contemporary models for thinking about knowledge and agency within a feminine context. The author builds a persuasive case from powerful close readings of texts, which invite readers to question their assumptions. I cannot now imagine the field of feminist modernist studies without the interventions of this project." — Barbara Green, author of Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture"This is a fascinating and very interesting intervention about the construction of knowledge/innocence within the field of literary studies. Anyone teaching or studying this period will find it of great use." — Stephanie A. Smith, author of Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Problem of Modern Female InnocencePart I. Negotiated Living 1. A Pragmatist’s Dilemma: The Collusion between Myth and Reality in the Tale of the Hull House Devil Baby2. Coming of Age via Critical Complaint: Reading Women’s Choices Not to Know in Realist Bildungsroman3. A Failure of Sympathy or of Narrative? Naturalism’s Jaded Women and the Narrative Cycle of Domestic Violence4. The Legacy of Naturalism, a Cycle of Leaving: Reading Agency in the Passive, Empty WomanPart II. Pragmatic Fantasies 5. Are Women People? Discourses of (Non)Personhood in Suffrage Poetry and Protest6. Making Women, Making Humans: Fantasies and Melancholic Mourning in Modern Sex Changes and Sex Losses7. Allowing Innocence? Belief, Knowledge, and the Modern CommunityNotesWorks CitedIndex