Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (458 pages)
Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Primary Interludes -- Acknowledgments -- List of Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Texts -- Introduction -- SECTION 1 Early Voices, Origins, Influences -- "Let me do nothing smale": Mary Moody Emerson and Women's "Talking" Manuscripts -- "With the Eyes That Are Given Me": Early Transcendentalism and Feminist Colonial Poetics in Sophia Peabody's Cuba Journal -- Fuller, Goethe, Bettine: Cultural Transfer and Imagined German Womanhood -- What Did Margaret Think of George? -- Elizabeth Peabody in the Nineteenth Century: Autobiographical Perspectives -- SECTION 2 Transcendentalist Circles -- "How It All Lies before Me To-day": Transcendentalist Women's Journeys into Attention -- "We have abolished domestic servitude": Women and Work at Brook Farm -- Sentimental Transcendentalism and Political Affect: Child and Fuller in New York -- (S)exchanges: Julia Ward Howe's The Hermaphrodite and the Gender Dialectics of Transcendentalism -- SECTION 3 Wider Circles of Vision and Action -- Green Exaltadas: Margaret Fuller, Transcendentalist Conservationism, and Antebellum Women's Nature Writing -- "Each Atomic Part": Edmonia Goodelle Highgate's African American Transcendentalism -- Caroline Healey Dall and the American Social Science Movement -- Transcendental Erotics, Same-Sex Desire, and Ethel's Love-Life -- SECTION 4 Late Voices and Legacies -- Required to "Speak": Caroline Healey Dall and the Defense of Margaret Fuller -- "A Woman's Place": The Transcendental Realism of Mary Wilkins Freeman -- Black Exaltadas: Race, Reform, and Spectacular Womanhood after Fuller -- The Cosmopolitan Project of Louisa May Alcott -- Selected Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index.
The first large-scale, collaborative study of women's voices and their vital role in the American transcendentalist movement. Many of its seventeen distinguished scholars work from newly recovered archives, and all offer fresh readings of understudied topics and texts, shedding light on female contributions.
9780820346977
American literature--19th century--History and criticism. American essays--Women authors--History and criticism. Transcendentalism in literature. Women and literature--United States--History--19th century. Transcendentalism (New England).