Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Verena Laschinger and Sirpa Salenius, is a collection of essays that offer a fresh perspective and original analyses of texts by American women writers of the long nineteenth century. The essays, which are written both by European and American scholars, discuss fiction by marginalized authors including Yolanda DuBois (African American fairy tales), Laura E. Richards (children’s literature), Metta Fuller Victor (dime novels/ detective fiction), and other pioneering writers of science fiction, gothic tales, and life narratives. The works covered by this collection represent the rough and ragged realities that women and girls in the nineteenth century experienced; the writings focus on their education, family life, on girls as victims of class prejudice as well as sexual and racial violence, but they also portray girls and women as empowering agents, survivors, and leaders. They do so with a high-voltage creative charge. As progressive pioneers, who forayed into unknown literary terrain and experimented with a variety of genres, the neglected American women writers introduced in this collection themselves emerge as role models whose innovative contribution to nineteenth-century literature the essays celebrate.

The essays in this book explore the role of Grace King’s fiction in the movement of American literature from local color and realism to modernism and show that her work exposes a postbellum New Orleans that is fragmented socially, politically, and linguistically. In her introduction, Melissa Walker Heidari examines selections from King’s journals and letters as views into her journey toward a modernist aesthetic—what King describes in one passage as "the continual voyage I made." Sirpa Salenius sees King’s fiction as a challenge to dominant conceptualizations of womanhood and a reaction against female oppression and heteronormativity. In his analysis of "An Affair of the Heart," Ralph J. Poole highlights the rhetoric of excess that reveals a social satire debunking sexual and racial double standards. Ineke Bockting shows the modernist aspects of King’s fiction through a stylistic analysis which explores spatial, temporal, biological, psychological, social, and racial liminalities. Françoise Buisson demonstrates that King’s writing "is inspired by the Southern oral tradition but goes beyond it by taking on a theatrical dimension that can be quite modern and even experimental at times." Kathie Birat claims that it is important to underline King’s relationship to realism, "for the metonymic functioning of space as a signifier for social relations is an important characteristic of the realist novel." Stéphanie Durrans analyzes "The Story of a Day" as an incest narrative and focuses on King’s development of a modernist aesthetics to serve her terrifying investigation into social ills as she probes the inner world of her silent character. Amy Doherty Mohr explores intersections between regionalism and modernism in public and silenced histories, as well as King’s treatment of myth and mobility. Brigitte Zaugg examines in "The Little Convent Girl" King’s presentation of the figure of the double and the issue of language as well as the narrative voice, which, she argues, "definitely inscribes the text, with its understatement, economy and quiet symbolism, in the modernist tradition." Miki Pfeffer closes the collection with an afterword in which she offers excerpts from King’s letters as encouragement for "scholars to seek Grace King as a primary source," arguing that "Grace King’s own words seem best able to dialogue with the critical readings herein." Each of these essays enables us to see King’s place in the construction of modernity; each illuminates the "continual voyage" that King made.

For centuries women have been marginalized and overlooked in American literary history. That injustice is corrected in this entertaining and provocative collection of 350 years of poetry and fiction by American women. From Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet to Margaret Fuller to Harriet Beecher Stowe, readers will encounter scores of lesser-known and forgotten writers who fully deserve to be rediscovered and enjoyed by new generations. Our famous women writers, including contemporary stars like Annie Proux and Jhumpa Lahiri, are showcased in their full literary context, offering an epic overview of the canon in one monumental, dazzling volume. This landmark anthology features the best work of our best American women, and was inspired and informed by the author's groundbreaking history celebrating women writers, A Jury of Her Peers.

This volume brings together essential writings by the unjustly neglected nineteenth-century philosopher Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904). A prominent ethicist, feminist, champion of animal welfare, and critic of Darwinism and atheism, Cobbe was well known and highly regarded in the Victorian era. This collection of her work introduces contemporary readers to Cobbe and shows how her thought developed over time, beginning in 1855 with her Essay on Intuitive Morals, in which she set out her duty-based moral theory, arguing that morality and religion are indissolubly connected. This work provided the framework within which she addressed many theoretical and practical issues in her prolific publishing career. In the 1860s and early 1870s, she gave an account of human duties to animals; articulated a duty-based form of feminism; defended a unique type of dualism in the philosophy of mind; and argued against evolutionary ethics. Cobbe put her philosophical views into practice, campaigning for women's rights and for first the regulation and later the abolition of vivisection. In turn her political experiences led her to revise her ethical theory. From the 1870s onwards she increasingly emphasized the moral role of the emotions, especially sympathy, and she theorized a gradual historical progression in sympathy. Moving into the 1880s, Cobbe combatted secularism, agnosticism, and atheism, arguing that religion is necessary not only for morality but also for meaningful life and culture. Shedding light on Cobbe's philosophical perspective and its applications, this volume demonstrates the range, systematicity and philosophical character of her work and makes her core ethical theory and its central applications and developments available for teaching and scholarship.

The 19th-Century French Short Story, by eminent scholar, Allan H. Pasco, seeks to offer a more comprehensive view of the definition, capabilities, and aims of short stories. The book examines general instances of the genre specifically in 19th-century France by recognizing their cultural context, demonstrating how close analysis of texts effectively communicates their artistry, and arguing for a distinction between middling and great short stories. Where previous studies have examined the writers of short stories individually, The 19th-Century French Short Story takes a broader lens to the subject, and looks at short story writers as they grapple with the artistic, ethical, and social concerns of their day. Making use of French short story masterpieces, with reinforcing comparisons to works from other traditions, this book offers the possibility of a more adequate appreciation of the under-valued short story genre.

In his discussion of clowns in nineteenth-century French painting from Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1857 La Sortie du bal masqué to Georges Rouault, art historian Francis Haskell wondered why they are so sad. The myth of the sad clown as an allegory for the unappreciated artist found echoes in the work of literary counterparts like Charles Baudelaire and his "Vieux saltimbanque" who seeks in vain a responsive public. For some, the attraction of the acrobatic clown for the creative imagination may have been his ability to embody the plight of the artist: these artistes generally led an ambulatory and uncertain existence. Other artists and writers, however, particularly the Decadents, perceived in the circus acrobat – including the acrobatic clown – a conceptual and performative tool for liberating their points of view from the prison-house of aesthetic convention. If authors’ protagonists were themselves sometimes failures, their aesthetic innovations often produced exhilarating artistic triumphs. Among the works examined in this study are the circus posters of Jules Chéret, Thomas Couture’s Pierrot and Harlequin paintings, Honoré Daumier’s saltimbanque paintings, Edgar Degas’s Miss Lala au Cirque Fernando, Édouard Manet’s Un bar au Folies-Bergère, the pantomimes of the Hanlon-Lees troupe, and novels, short stories, and poems by Théodore de Banville, Edmond de Goncourt, J. K. Huysmans, Gustave Kahn, Jules Laforgue, Catulle Mendès, Octave Mirbeau, Jean Richepin, Edouard Rod, and Marcel Schwob.

Victorian Contagion: Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination examines the literary and cultural production of contagion in the Victorian era and the way that production participated in a moral economy of surveillance and control. In this book, I attempt to make sense of how the discursive practice of contagion governed the interactions and correlations between medical science, literary creation, and cultural imagination. Victorians dealt with the menace of contagion by theorizing a working motto in claiming the goodness and godliness in cleanliness which was theorized, realized, and radicalized both through practice and imagination. The Victorian discourse around cleanliness and contagion, including all its treatments and preventions, developed into a culture of medicalization, a perception of surveillance, a politics of health, an economy of morality, and a way of thinking. This book is an attempt to understands the literary and cultural elements which contributed to fear and anticipation of contagion, and to explain why and how these elements still matter to us today.