B.A. Swarthmore College

Ph.D. University of Indiana

AREAS OF ACADEMIC INTEREST:

Pedagogy; American Literature; Women Writers; Politics of Literary History; Gay/Lesbian/Queer Theory

PUBLICATIONS:

Books:

• The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978.
• Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.
• American Women Regionalists: A Norton Anthology [with Marjorie Pryse]. New York: Norton, 1992.

Recent Articles:

• " 'Not in the Least American': Nineteenth-Century Literary Regionalism," College English 56 (1994): 877-95.
• "Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Politics of Recovery,"American Literary History 6 (1994): 600-11.

RECENT COURSES:

• ENG 433 Writing in the U.S., 1815-1860
• ENG 385 America's Radical Past, 1830-1860
• ENG 581 19th-Century American Women Writers
• ENG 580 Models of History in Literary Criticism: Constructing American Literature
• ENG 701 Gender, Race and Class in English Studies
• ENG 680 Problems of Period and Canon: Representign Lesbians in 19th-Century American Literature

CURRENT PROJECTS;

• Two recently completed articles: "The Poetics of Regionalism: Celia Thaxter's Among the Isles of Shoals [to be published in Fall 1997]; and " 'Oh My Sister, My Sister': The Rhetoric of Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie [forthcoming in American Literature]
• A recently completed entry on 19th-century American Literature for the Lesbian Culture volume of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality
• My current major project is the completion of a book, in collaboration with Marjorie Pryse, on 19th-century American literary regionalism, which grows out of the work we did in publishing the Norton Anthology of American Women Regionalists(1992)
• "What Grandma Read," a series of presentations to community groups across New York State on 19th-century American women writers, sponsored by the New York State Council on the Humanities and local libraries
• A week-long residency as a faculty member for the Seventh International Willa Cather Seminar, June 21-28, 1997

19TH-CENTURY BIBLIOGRAPHY PROJECT:

In the fall of 1995 I taught a graduate course on 19th-century American women writers, 1820-1870. In an effort to provide students with a context for the individual works we read (3 or 4 from each decade) and to give them an introduction to the various bibliographic resources available for research in this field, I created "decade groups" whose responsibility it was to complete a bibliography of published works by American women (excluding those works published in periodicals) during a given decade and to analyze the implications of this bibliography specifically with respect to the "representativeness" of the works read for class to the larger context of all the works published by women during that decade. Underlying this project was the desire to make clear to students that the texts available for such a course as this represent only a fragment of the total work of women writers during the period, and that we are as much in danger of developing a skewed version of American literary history if we look only at the texts by women that have been reprinted in the last twenty years as we are if we look only at the work of male writers. In other words, the category of the "marginalized" can seem quite privileged when set in the context of a category that might well be called "the not-yet-marginalized." The project proved quite successful and students wished to share the results of their work with others in the field. During the summer of 1996, Lois Dellert Raskin, a member of the class and of the 20s "decade group," designed an independent study project that had as its goal preparing two of the bibliographies, the 1820s and the 1830s, for presentation on the Web. The bibliographies that follow are the result of her work of refining and clarifying the original data and preparing it for electronic media. We offer these bibliographies in the hope that they will be useful to others and we welcome comments, corrections and discussion.




Bibliography 1820s

Bibliography 1830s

Chronological Listing 1820s

Chronological Listing 1830-1835

Chronological Listing 1836-1839

19th-Century American Women Writer's Site