Woman's Fiction by Nina Baym
This reissue of the pioneering and standard book on antebellum women's domestic novels contains a new introduction situating the book in the context of important recent developments in the study of women's writing. Nina Baym considers 130 novels by 48 women, focusing on the works of a dozen especially productive and successful writers. Woman's Fiction is a major-work in nineteenth-century literature, reexamining changes in the literary canon and the meaning of sentimentalism, while responding to current critical discussions of 'the body' in literary texts."Informative and stimulating. . . Nina Baym has undertaken a systematic analysis of that nineteenth-century American fiction normally dismissed as at best trivially sentimental. . . . Woman's Fiction offers a fresh perspective on a largely forgotten body of literature."--American Literature
"Perceives in the fiction of, by, and for women in the period stated a popular genre that made a particular kind of feminist avowal for the times, one that rejected the concept of helplessness and urged the application of intelligence and courage to trying situations. . . . Baym marshals ample supporting evidence from the outpouring of such fiction."--ALA Booklist
Nina Baym taught at the University of Illinois, where she specialized in American Literature. She is General Editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, the most widely used textbook in the field. She has won Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Mellon Foundation fellowships. In 2000 she won the Jay Hubbell Award from the Modern Language Association, awarded for lifetime contributions to the study of American literature. Her first book was about Nathaniel Hawthorne, and she has published a Twayne study of The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne's complaint in a private letter about the damn'd mob of scribbling women, whose works were popular while his were not inspired her to find out who these forgotten women were and what they wrote. The first of her books on this topic was Woman's Fiction (1978); then came American Women Writers and the Work of History; next American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences. Some of her essays were brought together in Feminism and American Literary History. Her newest foray is Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927, which describes the western books of over 340 American women including Native American women and African Americans, and covers the transMississippi West from Texas to Oregon.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780252062858 |
| ISBN 10 | 025206285X |
| Title | Woman's Fiction |
| Author | Nina Baym |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | University of Illinois Press |
| Year published | 1993-02-01 |
| Number of pages | 360 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |