Books by "Mary Saracino Zboray"
3 books found
A teenage orphan from Vermont, Mary Gibson burst onto the literary scene during the early 1850s as a star writer, under the pseudonym Winnie Woodfern, for more than half a dozen Boston “story papers,” mass-circulation weekly periodicals that specialized in popular fiction. Although she would soon join such famous woman authors as Fannie Fern and E. D. E. N. Southworth as featured contributors to the New York Ledger, America’s greatest story paper, Gibson’s subsequent output rarely matched the gender-bending creativity of the tales written in her late teens and early twenties and reprinted in this volume. But “Hero Strong” and Other Stories does much more than recover the work of a forgotten literary prodigy. As explained by historian Daniel A. Cohen, Gibson’s tales also illuminate major interrelated transformations in American girlhood and American women’s authorship. Challenging traditional gender expectations, thousands of girls of Gibson’s generation not only aspired to public careers as writers, artists, educators, and even doctors but also began to experiment with new forms of “female masculinity” in attitude, bearing, behavior, dress, and sexuality—a pattern only gradually domesticated by the nonthreatening image of the “tomboy.” Some, such as Gibson, at once realized and reenacted their dreams on the pages of antebellum story papers. This first modern scholarly edition of Mary Gibson’s early fiction features ten tales of teenage girls (seemingly much like Gibson herself) who fearlessly appropriate masculine traits, defy contemporary gender norms, and struggle to fulfill high worldly ambitions. In addition to several heroines who seek “fame and riches” as authors or artists, Gibson’s unconventional protagonists include three female medical students who resort to grave robbing and a Boston ingénue who dreams of achieving military glory in battle. By moving beyond “literary domesticity” and embracing bold new models of women’s authorship, artistry, and worldly achievement, Gibson and her fictional protagonists stand as exemplars of “the first generation of American girls who imagined they could do almost anything.” Daniel A. Cohen is an associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University. His previous publications include Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 and ‘The Female Marine’ and Related Works: Narratives of Cross-Dressing and Urban Vice in America’s Early Republic.
Education was decisive in recasting women's subjectivity and the felt reality of their collective experience in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. Asking how and why women shaped their lives anew through education, Mary Kelley measures the signifi
With the transformation and expansion of the nineteenth-century American literary canon in the past two decades, the work of the era's American women poets has come to be widely anthologized. But scant scholarship has arisen to make full sense of it. From School to Salon responds to this glaring gap. Mary Loeffelholz presents the work of nineteenth-century women poets in the context of the history, culture, and politics of the times. She uses a series of case studies to discuss why the recovery of nineteenth-century women's poetry has been a process of anthologization without succeeding analysis. At the same time, she provides a much-needed account of the changing social contexts through which nineteenth-century American women became poets: initially by reading, reciting, writing, and publishing poetry in school, and later, by doing those same things in literary salons, institutions created by the high-culture movement of the day. Along the way, Loeffelholz provides detailed analyses of the poetry, much of which has received little or no recent critical attention. She focuses on the works of a remarkably diverse array of poets, including Lucretia Maria Davidson, Lydia Sigourney, Maria Lowell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Emily Dickinson, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Annie Fields. Impeccably researched and gracefully written, From School to Salon moves the study of nineteenth-century women's poetry to a new and momentous level.