How did nineteenth-century women's poetry shift from the poetess poetry of lyric effusion and hyper-femininity to the muscular epic of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh? Networking the Nation re-writes women's poetic traditions by demonstrating the debt that Barrett Browning's revolutionary poetics owed to a circle of American and British women poets living in Florence and campaigning in their poetry and in their salons for Italian Unification. These women poets—Isa Blagden, Elizabeth Kinney, Eliza Ogilvy, and Theodosia Garrow Trollope—formed with Barrett Browning a network of poetry, sociability, and politics, which was devoted to the mission of campaigning for Italy as an independent nation state. In their poetic experiments with the active lyric voice, in their forging of a transnational persona through the periodical press, in their salons and spiritualist séances, the women poets formed a network that attempted to assert and perform an independent unified Italy in their work. Networking the Nation maps the careers of these expatriate women poets who were based in Florence in the key years of Risorgimento politics, racing their transnational social and print communities, and the problematic but schismatic shift in their poetry from the conventional sphere of the poetess. In the fraught and thrilling engagement with their adopted nation's revolutionary turmoil, and in their experiments with different types of writing agency, the women poets in this book offer revolutions of other kinds: revolutions of women's poetry and the very act of writing.

New ser. v. 6-29 include 77th-100th Annual report of the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1946-1969-70 (previously and subsequently published separately).

Dioramas and panoramas, freaks and magicians, waxworks and menageries, obscure relics and stuffed animals . . . a dazzling assortment of curiosities attracted the gaze of the 19th-century spectator at the dime museum. Author Andrea Stulman Dennett recaptures this ephemeral and scarcely documented institution of American culture from the margins of history. 24 illustrations.

In Jacksonian America, as Grund exposes, the wealthy inhabitants of northern cities and the plantation South may have been willing to accept their poorer neighbors as political and legal peers, but rarely as social equals. In this important work, he thus sheds light on the nature of the struggle between “aristocracy” and “democracy” that loomed so large in early republican Americans’ minds. Francis J. Grund, a German emigrant, was one of the most influential journalists in America in the three decades preceding the Civil War. He also wrote several books, including this fictional, satiric travel memoir in response to Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous Democracy in America. Armin Mattes provides a thorough account of Grund’s dynamic engagement in American political life, and brings to light many of Grund’s reflections on American social and political life previously published only in German. Mattes shows how Grund’s work can expand our understanding of the emerging democratic political culture and society in the antebellum United States.