Sharon M. Harris – författare

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, many women began to write historical analysis, taking a big role in defining the new American Republicanism. The work collected here ranges from reportage to poetic historical narratives and historical drama to depictions of women.

BLIncludes selections from The Gleaner, her major work, and other publicationsAs a novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet, Judith Sargent Murray candidly and often humorously asserted her opinions about the social and political conditions of women in late eighteenth-century America. As a committed feminist, she urged American women to enter a `new era in female history', yet published her own writings under a man's name in the hopes of more widely disseminating her ideas.

As a novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet, Judith Sargent Murray candidly and often humorously asserted her opinions about the social and political conditions of women in late eighteenth-century America. As a committed feminist, she urged American women to enter a "new era in female history", yet published her own writings under a man's name in the hopes of more widely disseminating her ideas. This volume includes selections from The Gleaner, her major work, and other publications.

Modern feminism has deep roots. Over the past 2500 years, female writers and thinkers across the world have expressed their feelings about gender roles, their frustrations and successes, their struggles for equality. This four-volume anthology brings together the richest collection of feminist texts available with over 120 entries, most of them complete essays or chapters, arranged broadly chronologically. Readers can juxtapose seventeenth-century 'New World' feminist writing with European counterparts, historical with poststructuralist feminist writing, Asian with Anglophone voices and 'difference feminism' with universalist statements. Each text features an editorial headnote and annotation, while the general introduction sets feminism in its historical and global contexts. The anthology's inclusion of multiple genres - letters and poems as well as philosophical or polemical prose - offers new possibilities for the study of genre and feminist discourse.

This volume illustrates the significance of epistolarity as a literary phenomenon intricately interwoven with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural developments. Rejecting the common categorization of letters as primarily private documents, this collection of essays demonstrates the genre's persistent public engagements with changing cultural dynamics of the revolutionary, early republican, and antebellum eras. Sections of the collection treat letters' implication in transatlanticism, authorship, and reform movements as well as the politics and practices of editing letters. The wide range of authors considered include Mercy Otis Warren, Charles Brockden Brown, members of the Emerson and Peabody families, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Stoddard, Catherine Brown, John Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. The volume is particularly relevant for researchers in U.S. literature and history, as well as women's writing and periodical studies. This dynamic collection offers scholars an exemplary template of new approaches for exploring an understudied yet critically important literary genre.

From the late 1860s until her death in 1910, Rebecca Harding Davis was one of the best-known writers in America. She broke into print as a young woman in the 1860s with "Life in the Iron Mills," which established her as one of the pioneers of American realism. She developed a literary theory of the "commonplace" nearly two decades before William Dean Howels shaped his own version of the concept. Yet, in spite of her importance to the literary and popular culture of her time, she has been, for the most part, ignored by scholars. Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism helps to change that.

This volume gathers more than one hundred letters-most of them previously unpublished-written by Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814). Warren, whose works include a three-volume history of the American Revolution as well as plays and poems, was a major literary figure of her era and one of the most important American women writers of the eighteenth century. Her correspondents included Martha and George Washington, Abigail and John Adams, and Catharine Macaulay.Until now, Warren's letters have been published sporadically, in small numbers, and mainly to help complete the collected correspondence of some of the famous men to whom she wrote. This volume addresses that imbalance by focusing on Warren's letters to her family members and other women. As they flesh out our view of Warren and correct some misconceptions about her, the letters offer a wealth of insights into eighteenth-century American culture, including social customs, women's concerns, political and economic conditions, medical issues, and attitudes on child rearing.Letters Warren sent to other women who had lost family members (Warren herself lost three children) reveal her sympathies; letters to a favorite son, Winslow, show her sharing her ambitions with a child who resisted her advice. What readers of other Warren letters may have only sensed about her is now revealed more fully: she was a woman of considerable intellect, religious faith, compassion, literary intelligence, and acute sensitivity to the historical moment of even everyday events in the new American republic.

The ten stories gathered here show Rebecca Harding Davis to be an acute observer of the conflicts and ambiguities of a divided nation and position her as a major transitional writer between romanticism and realism. Capturing the fluctuating cultural environment of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, the stories explore such issues as racial prejudice and slavery, the loneliness and powerlessness of women, and the effects of postwar market capitalism on the working classes. Davis’s characters include soldiers and civilians, men and women, young and old, blacks and whites. Instead of focusing (like many writers of the period) on major conflicts and leaders, Davis takes readers into the intimate battles fought on family farms and backwoods roads, delving into the minds of those who experienced the destruction on both sides of the conflict.Davis spent the war years in the Pennsylvania and Virginia borderlands, a region she called a “vast armed camp.” Here, divided families, ravaged communities, and shifting loyalties were the norm. As the editors say, “Davis does not limit herself to writing about slavery, abolition, or reconstruction. Instead, she shows us that through the fighting, the rebuilding, and the politics, life goes on. Even during a war, people must live: they work, eat, sleep, and love.”

The ten stories gathered here show Rebecca Harding Davis to be an acute observer of the conflicts and ambiguities of a divided nation and position her as a major transitional writer between romanticism and realism. Capturing the fluctuating cultural environment of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, the stories explore such issues as racial prejudice and slavery, the loneliness and powerlessness of women, and the effects of postwar market capitalism on the working classes. Davis’s characters include soldiers and civilians, men and women, young and old, blacks and whites. Instead of focusing (like many writers of the period) on major conflicts and leaders, Davis takes readers into the intimate battles fought on family farms and backwoods roads, delving into the minds of those who experienced the destruction on both sides of the conflict.Davis spent the war years in the Pennsylvania and Virginia borderlands, a region she called a “vast armed camp.” Here, divided families, ravaged communities, and shifting loyalties were the norm. As the editors say, “Davis does not limit herself to writing about slavery, abolition, or reconstruction. Instead, she shows us that through the fighting, the rebuilding, and the politics, life goes on. Even during a war, people must live: they work, eat, sleep, and love.”

Nineteenth-century fiction writer and journalist Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) is best known for her novella Life in the Iron Mills. Its publication in 1861 launched her stunning fifty-year career that yielded a corpus of some 500 published works, including short stories, novels, novellas, sketches, and social commentary. Davis's unique mode of writing anticipated literary realism twenty years before the time usually associated with its genesis. Today, her life and work continue to figure prominently in the study of American literature and culture. Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography is the annotated edition of her 1904 autobiography, Bits of Gossip, and a previously unpublished family history written for her children. The memoirs are not traditional autobiography; rather, they are Davis's perspective on the extraordinary cultural changes that occurred during her lifetime and of the remarkable - and sometimes scandalous - people who shaped the events. She provides intimate portraits of the famous people she knew, including Emerson, Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Ann Stephens, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Horace Greeley. Equally important are Davis's commentaries on the political activists of the Civil War era, from Abraham Lincoln to Booker T. Washington, from the ""daughters of the Southland"" to Lucretia Mott, from Henry Ward Beecher to William Still. Whereas Bits of Gossip expands our understanding of Davis as cultural critic and observer of life, the family history offers new information on Davis's early life and the influences that led her to become one of the nineteenth century's pioneering Realists and cultural commentators. Together they bring a human voice to the nineteenth-century American milieu.

Nineteenth-century fiction writer and journalist Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) is best known for her novella Life in the Iron Mills. Its publication in 1861 launched her stunning fifty-year career that yielded a corpus of some 500 published works, including short stories, novels, novellas, sketches, and social commentary. Davis's unique mode of writing anticipated literary realism twenty years before the time usually associated with its genesis. Today, her life and work continue to figure prominently in the study of American literature and culture. Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography is the annotated edition of her 1904 autobiography, Bits of Gossip, and a previously unpublished family history written for her children. The memoirs are not traditional autobiography; rather, they are Davis's perspective on the extraordinary cultural changes that occurred during her lifetime and of the remarkable - and sometimes scandalous - people who shaped the events. She provides intimate portraits of the famous people she knew, including Emerson, Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Ann Stephens, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Horace Greeley. Equally important are Davis's commentaries on the political activists of the Civil War era, from Abraham Lincoln to Booker T. Washington, from the ""daughters of the Southland"" to Lucretia Mott, from Henry Ward Beecher to William Still. Whereas Bits of Gossip expands our understanding of Davis as cultural critic and observer of life, the family history offers new information on Davis's early life and the influences that led her to become one of the nineteenth century's pioneering Realists and cultural commentators. Together they bring a human voice to the nineteenth-century American milieu.

Unravel the intriguing life of a woman who edited the literary greats of her day and forged a path to the golden age of mystery writing.Elizabeth Garver Jordan was renowned not only for her own writing but also for her influence in journalism and literature. Her love of intrigue started when she was five and made a secret pact with the family cook, who taught her to read. In her first career as a journalist, Jordan climbed the ranks from columnist to an editor of Pulitzer’s prestigious New YorkWorld Sunday edition, where her work as an investigative journalist took her from the Bowery to the mansions of Fifth Avenue. She specialized in covering murder trials, including that of the notorious Lizzie Borden. But while the Borden trial made Jordan famous, it also led to a scandal that would follow her throughout her life.As editor for Harper’s Bazar, Jordan changed the magazine into the glossy fashion publication for which it remains famous today. She also emphasized fiction, bringing Jack London, Stephen Crane, Henry James, and many suffragists to its pages. When she moved to Harper books as literary editor, she was instrumental to the successful careers of writers such as Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and Fannie Hurst.But perhaps the most surprising influence Jordan wielded was in the field of mystery writing, as an author herself. Although erased from histories of the genre until now, she was one of the premier American mystery writers of the early twentieth century. Like Agatha Christie, Jordan’s mysteries were high-quality, innovative stories—ranging from locked rooms to country estates to gothic settings—that helped reshape the genre. Here, for the first time, the full story of her life—including her close relationship with Frances Hodgson Burnett—is finally revealed.

Rebecca Harding Davis is best known for her gritty short story “Life in the Iron-Mills,” set in her native Wheeling, West Virginia. Far less is known of her later career among elite social circles in Philadelphia, New York, and Europe, or her relationships with American presidents and leading international figures in the worlds of literature and the stage. In the first book-length biography of Davis, Sharon M. Harris traces the extraordinary life of this pioneering realist and recovers her status as one of America’s notable women journalists. Harris also examines Rebecca’s role as the leading member of the Davis family, a unique and nationally recognized family of writers that shaped the changing culture of later nineteenth-century literature and journalism.This accessible treatment of Davis’s life, based on deep research in archival sources, provides new perspective on topics ranging from sectional tensions in the border South to the gendered world of nineteenth-century publishing. It promises to be the authoritative treatment of an important figure in the literary history of West Virginia and the wider world.