Writing the body : sentimental rhetoric in nineteenth-century Southern women writers’ fiction

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Jamie Watson (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Advisor
Maria Carla Sánchez

Abstract: This project explores nineteenth-century Southern women writers’ discussions of self-regulation in their sentimental fiction. This dissertation seeks to enrich literary scholarship’s understanding of Southern women’s writing in Victorian America; while nineteenth-century women’s embodied experiences have long been studied, there has not heretofore been a study of nineteenth-century Southern women’s sentimental fiction through the lens of sentimental rhetoric. I have chosen women authors whose works were relatively popular for Americans north and south of the Mason Dixon line but remain obscured by the canon of nineteenth-century American literature privileging works by Northern writers. These women authors are Caroline Gilman, Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Grace King. Scholars tend to study Northern women writers, if they study women writers at all; this gives scholars of nineteenth-century literature a false sense of the influence Southern women writers had on American social reform. Further, scholars can take for granted the rhetorical nuances Southern women writers possessed to be relatively popular among Northern and Southern authors—despite intense divisiveness in nineteenth-century America.

Additional Information

Publication
Dissertation
Language: English
Date: 2022
Keywords
American South, American women writers, Nineteenth-century, Southern women writers
Subjects
Women authors, American $z Southern States $x History $y 19th century
American literature $x Women authors $z Southern States $x History and criticism
American literature $y 19th century $x History and criticism
Sentimentalism in literature

Email this document to