Cynthia J. Davis – författare

The postbellum period saw many privileged Americans pursuing a civilized ideal premised on insulation from pain. Medico-scientific advances in anesthetics and analgesics and emergent religious sects like Christian Science made pain avoidance seem newly possible. The upper classes could increasingly afford to distance themselves from the suffering they claimed to feel more exquisitely than did their supposedly less refined contemporaries and antecedents. The five US literary realists examined in this study resisted this contemporary revulsion from pain without going so far as to join those who celebrated suffering for its invigorating effects. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt embraced the concept of a heightened sensitivity to pain as a consequence of the civilizing process but departed from their peers by delineating alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering. Although the treatment of pain in other influential nineteenth century literary modes including sentimentalism and naturalism has attracted ample scholarly attention, this book offers the first sustained analysis of pain''s importance to US literary realism as practiced by five of its most influential proponents.

The postbellum period saw many privileged Americans pursuing a civilized ideal premised on insulation from pain. Medico-scientific advances in anesthetics and analgesics and emergent religious sects like Christian Science made pain avoidance seem newly possible. The upper classes could increasingly afford to distance themselves from the suffering they claimed to feel more exquisitely than did their supposedly less refined contemporaries and antecedents. The five US literary realists examined in this study resisted this contemporary revulsion from pain without going so far as to join those who celebrated suffering for its invigorating effects. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt embraced the concept of a heightened sensitivity to pain as a consequence of the civilizing process but departed from their peers by delineating alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering. Although the treatment of pain in other influential nineteenth century literary modes including sentimentalism and naturalism has attracted ample scholarly attention, this book offers the first sustained analysis of pain''s importance to US literary realism as practiced by five of its most influential proponents.

This extensive chronology of US women's writing and social history catalogues authors of fiction and non-fiction across a wide range of genres - novels, poetry, cookbooks, songs - and describes the events from world-transforming to everyday occurences when these works were produced. This invaluable resource is a celebration of the many forms of works - written and social, tangible and intangible - produced by American women.

Women Writers in the United States is a celebration of the many forms of work--written and social, tangible and intangible--produced by American women. Davis and West document the variety and volume of women''s work in the U.S. in a clear and accessible timeline format. They present information on the full spectrum of women''s writing--including fiction, poetry, biography, political manifestos, essays, advice columns,and cookbooks, alongside a chronology of developments in social and cultural history that are especially pertinent to women''s lives. This extensive chronology illustrates the diversity of women who have lived and written in the U.S. and creates a sense of the full trajectory of individual careers. A valuable and rich source of information on women''s studies, literature, and history, Women Writers in the United States will enable readers to locate familiar and unfamiliar women''s texts and to place them in the context out which they emerged.

The postbellum period saw many privileged Americans pursuing a civilized ideal premised on insulation from pain. Medico-scientific advances in anesthetics and analgesics and emergent religious sects like Christian Science made pain avoidance seem newly possible. The upper classes could increasingly afford to distance themselves from the suffering they claimed to feel more exquisitely than did their supposedly less refined contemporaries and antecedents. The five US literary realists examined in this study resisted this contemporary revulsion from pain without going so far as to join those who celebrated suffering for its invigorating effects. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt embraced the concept of a heightened sensitivity to pain as a consequence of the civilizing process but departed from their peers by delineating alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering. Although the treatment of pain in other influential nineteenth century literary modes including sentimentalism and naturalism has attracted ample scholarly attention, this book offers the first sustained analysis of pain's importance to US literary realism as practiced by five of its most influential proponents.

During the period of the professionalization of American medicine, many authors were concerned with a concurrent tendency to define identity in biological terms. Most of them doctors or patients themselves, they used literature polemically to convey their views about the meaning of the body and the origin and cure of disease. This book demonstrates that emergent medical beliefs about bodily functions and malfunctions surface in the writings of these authors not simply as thematic concerns but as problems for narrative form. Through a series of careful, historicized readings of works by a range of authors—including Louisa May Alcott, Charles W. Chesnutt, Margaret Fuller, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frances E. Watkins Harper, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Pauline E. Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps—the book relates both the what and the how of representation to specific theories of embodiment emerging during this burgeoning yet awkward period of medical history. Through five case studies, Bodily and Narrative Forms charts the possibilities literature offers for promoting or contesting biological definitions of the self. These studies identify narrative structure as one of the places where the body is represented—a place often overlooked but crucial to understanding the complicated, mediated relationship between context and content, as well as the dynamic, complex properties of form, whether narrative or corporeal. Each of the studies documents authorial efforts to depict corporeal beliefs via literary forms, demonstrating that these depictions extend beyond narrative content to include generic and stylistic choices. They also show the complex ways in which formal attributes and strategies may complicate authors' attempts to directly represent—as well as readers' attempts to directly access—the body through literature.

Considers Gilman’s place in American literary and social history by examining her relationships to other prominent intellectuals of her era

By placing Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the company of her contemporaries, this collection seeks to correct misunderstandings of the feminist writer and lecturer as an isolated radical. Gilman believed and preached that no life is ever led in isolation; indeed, the cornerstone of her philosophy was the idea that “humanity is a relation.”   Gilman''s highly public and combative stances as a critic and social activist brought her into contact and conflict with many of the major thinkers and writers of the period, including Mary Austin, Margaret Sanger, Ambrose Bierce, Grace Ellery Channing, Lester Ward, Inez Haynes Gillmore, William Randolph Hearst, Karen Horney, William Dean Howells, Catharine Beecher, George Bernard Shaw, and Owen Wister. Gilman wrote on subjects as wide ranging as birth control, eugenics, race, women''s rights and suffrage, psychology, Marxism, and literary aesthetics. Her many contributions to social, intellectual, and literary life at the turn of the 20th century raised the bar for future discourse, but at great personal and professional cost.