Karen L. Kilcup – författare

Throughout the 19th century, American poetry was a profoundly populist literary form. It circulated in New England magazines and Southern newspapers; it was read aloud in taverns, homes, and schools across the country. Antebellum reviewers envisioned poetry as the touchstone democratic genre, and their Civil War–era counterparts celebrated its motivating power, singing poems on battlefields. Following the war, however, as criticism grew more professionalized and American literature emerged as an academic subject, reviewers increasingly elevated difficult, dispassionate writing and elite readers over their supposedly common counterparts, thereby separating “authentic” poetry for intellectuals from “popular” poetry for everyone else.\Conceptually and methodologically unique among studies of 19th-century American poetry, Who Killed American Poetry? not only charts changing attitudes toward American poetry, but also applies these ideas to the work of representative individual poets. Closely analyzing hundreds of reviews and critical essays, Karen L. Kilcup tracks the century’s developing aesthetic standards and highlights the different criteria reviewers used to assess poetry based on poets’ class, gender, ethnicity, and location. She shows that, as early as the 1820s, critics began to marginalize some kinds of emotional American poetry, a shift many scholars have attributed primarily to the late-century emergence of affectively restrained modernist ideals. Mapping this literary critical history enables us to more readily apprehend poetry’s status in American culture—both in the past and present—and encourages us to scrutinize the standards of academic criticism that underwrite contemporary aesthetics and continue to constrain poetry’s appeal.Who American Killed Poetry? enlarges our understanding of American culture over the past two hundred years and will interest scholars in literary studies, historical poetics, American studies, gender studies, canon criticism, genre studies, the history of criticism, and affect studies. It will also appeal to poetry readers and those who enjoy reading about American cultural history.

Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology is a multicultural, multigenre collection celebrating the quality and diversity of nineteenth century American women's expression.

This critical reader, specifically designed to accompany the anthology, contains twelve original essays - ten newly-written - on a wide range of topics, together with an introductory overview by the editor.Responding to the rich generic and thematic diversity of the writing represented in Nineteenth-century American Women Writers: An Anthology, also edited by Karen L. Kilcup, this critical reader, specifically designed to accompany the anthology, contains twelve original essays - ten newly-written - on a wide range of topics, together with an introductory overview by the editor. The volume explores for students and scholars the interwoven matters of history, canonicity, and criticism, highlighting the collective importance of nineteenth-century women's writing, an illuminating in particular the complex hybrid texts and shorter genres that many women produced.The essays address large conceptual issues and offer suggestive close readings of individual texts. They ask such questions as: How do these texts use and "misuse" the conventions of their time to create new perspectives, forms, and voices?What are the connections between various kinds of texts, writers, and genres?How do issues of identity and location inform the writing and our interpretations of it?What aesthetic, cultural, and political issues do these writers raise, both in their content and in their formal experiments?Topics covered include: literary nationalism and regionalism; Southern and western women writers; tradition and transformation in Native American and Mexican American women authors; race, reform, and sentimentality; disability, sentimentality and femininity; women's economic independence; spirituality and class in African-American women's literature; gender, genre, and feminist discourse; women poets and the cannon.

This critical reader, specifically designed to accompany the anthology, contains twelve original essays - ten newly-written - on a wide range of topics, together with an introductory overview by the editor.Responding to the rich generic and thematic diversity of the writing represented in Nineteenth-century American Women Writers: An Anthology, also edited by Karen L. Kilcup, this critical reader, specifically designed to accompany the anthology, contains twelve original essays - ten newly-written - on a wide range of topics, together with an introductory overview by the editor. The volume explores for students and scholars the interwoven matters of history, canonicity, and criticism, highlighting the collective importance of nineteenth-century women's writing, an illuminating in particular the complex hybrid texts and shorter genres that many women produced.The essays address large conceptual issues and offer suggestive close readings of individual texts. They ask such questions as: How do these texts use and "misuse" the conventions of their time to create new perspectives, forms, and voices?What are the connections between various kinds of texts, writers, and genres?How do issues of identity and location inform the writing and our interpretations of it?What aesthetic, cultural, and political issues do these writers raise, both in their content and in their formal experiments?Topics covered include: literary nationalism and regionalism; Southern and western women writers; tradition and transformation in Native American and Mexican American women authors; race, reform, and sentimentality; disability, sentimentality and femininity; women's economic independence; spirituality and class in African-American women's literature; gender, genre, and feminist discourse; women poets and the cannon.

This ground-breaking anthology establishes the tradition of early Native American women's writing within American literature and American women's history. With a regionally diverse group of writers, this richly interwoven collection explores in depth the work of well-known figures such as Pauline Johnson, Sarah Winnemucca and Zitkala-ea, as well as less familiar writers such as Narcissa Owen, Buffalo Bird Woman, Mary Jemison, Ora Eddleman Reed, Sophia Alice Callahan, Owl Woman and Annette Leevier. Anonymously authored "women's texts" are also included, along with writing by children and young adults.Karen Kilcup challenges traditional mainstream notions of what constitutes literature, including political, historical, and autobiographical writing alongside more familiarly "aesthetic" forms like romantic poetry, short fiction and spiritual literature. As well as representing traditional oral narratives, the collection invites readers to hear the "translation" of orality into written forms.Brief headnotes outline the writers' lives and indicate connections between and among the writers. The volume also includes brief bibliographies of primary and secondary materials for each writer.A key text for the classroom, Native American Women's Writing: An Anthology c. 1800-1924 offers an inviting wealth of newly discovered material for scholars and general readers alike.

This ground-breaking anthology establishes the tradition of early Native American women's writing within American literature and American women's history. With a regionally diverse group of writers, this richly interwoven collection explores in depth the work of well-known figures such as Pauline Johnson, Sarah Winnemucca and Zitkala-ea, as well as less familiar writers such as Narcissa Owen, Buffalo Bird Woman, Mary Jemison, Ora Eddleman Reed, Sophia Alice Callahan, Owl Woman and Annette Leevier. Anonymously authored "women's texts" are also included, along with writing by children and young adults.Karen Kilcup challenges traditional mainstream notions of what constitutes literature, including political, historical, and autobiographical writing alongside more familiarly "aesthetic" forms like romantic poetry, short fiction and spiritual literature. As well as representing traditional oral narratives, the collection invites readers to hear the "translation" of orality into written forms.Brief headnotes outline the writers' lives and indicate connections between and among the writers. The volume also includes brief bibliographies of primary and secondary materials for each writer.A key text for the classroom, Native American Women's Writing: An Anthology c. 1800-1924 offers an inviting wealth of newly discovered material for scholars and general readers alike.

Virtually every famous nineteenth-century writer (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson)— and many not so famous—wrote literature for children; many contributed regularly to children’s periodicals, and many entered the field of nature writing, responding to and forwarding the century’s huge social and cultural changes. Appreciating America’s unique natural wonders dovetailed with children’s growth as citizens, but children’s journals often exceeded a pedagogical purpose, intending also to entertain and delight. Though these volumes aimed at a relatively conservative and mostly white, middle-class, and affluent audience, some selections allowed both children and their parents room for imaginative escape from restrictive social norms. Covering a period that initially regarded children’s natural bodies as laboring resources, Stronger, Truer, Bolder traces the shifting pedagogical impulse surrounding nature and the environment through the transformations that included America’s nineteenth century emergence as an industrial power. Karen L. Kilcup shows how children’s literature mirrored those changes in various ways. In its earliest incarnations, it taught children (and their parents) facts about the natural world and about proper behavior vis-à-vis both human and nonhuman others. More significantly, as periodical writing for children advanced, this literature increasingly promoted children’s environmental agency and envisioned their potential influence on concerns ranging from animal rights and interspecies equity to conservation and environmental justice. Such understanding of and engagement with nature not only propelled children toward ethical adulthood but also formed a foundation for responsible American citizenship.

Virtually every famous nineteenth-century writer (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson)— and many not so famous—wrote literature for children; many contributed regularly to children’s periodicals, and many entered the field of nature writing, responding to and forwarding the century’s huge social and cultural changes. Appreciating America’s unique natural wonders dovetailed with children’s growth as citizens, but children’s journals often exceeded a pedagogical purpose, intending also to entertain and delight. Though these volumes aimed at a relatively conservative and mostly white, middle-class, and affluent audience, some selections allowed both children and their parents room for imaginative escape from restrictive social norms. Covering a period that initially regarded children’s natural bodies as laboring resources, Stronger, Truer, Bolder traces the shifting pedagogical impulse surrounding nature and the environment through the transformations that included America’s nineteenth century emergence as an industrial power. Karen L. Kilcup shows how children’s literature mirrored those changes in various ways. In its earliest incarnations, it taught children (and their parents) facts about the natural world and about proper behavior vis-à-vis both human and nonhuman others. More significantly, as periodical writing for children advanced, this literature increasingly promoted children’s environmental agency and envisioned their potential influence on concerns ranging from animal rights and interspecies equity to conservation and environmental justice. Such understanding of and engagement with nature not only propelled children toward ethical adulthood but also formed a foundation for responsible American citizenship.

Over the River and Through the Wood is the first and only collection of its kind, offering readers an unequaled view of the quality and diversity of nineteenth-century American children's poetry. Most American poets wrote for children - from famous names such as Ralph Waldo Emerson to less familiar figures like Christina Moody, an African American author who published her first book at sixteen. In its excellence, relevance, and abundance, much of this work rivals or surpasses poetry written for adults, yet it has languished - inaccessible and unread - in old periodicals, gift books, and primers. This groundbreaking anthology remedies that loss, presenting material that is both critical to the tradition of American poetry and also a delight to read. Complemented by period illustrations, this definitive collection includes work by poets from all geographical regions, as well as rarely seen poems by immigrant and ethnic writers and by children themselves. Karen L. Kilcup and Angela Sorby have combed the archives to present an extensive selection of rediscoveries along with traditional favorites.By turns playful, contemplative, humorous, and subversive, these poems appeal to modern sensibilities while giving scholars a revised picture of the nineteenth-century literary landscape.