White Roses on the Floor of Heaven
White Roses on the Floor of Heaven

Author: Susanna Morrill

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-05-11

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1135513716

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First published in 2006. This volume marks the tenth volume in its series: Religion in History, Society and Culture. This series is designed to bring exciting new work by young scholars on religion to a wider audience. Susanna Morrill offers here a fine and sensitive reading of the little known, and often simply caricatured, history of the religious lives of Mormon women at the turn of the twentieth century. She reads the extensive use of flower imagery in poetry and other writing by these women as a species of lay theologizing—a way that LDS women elaborated and celebrated the latent female symbolism within a still young and incomplete religious system.

The Language of Flowers
The Language of Flowers

Author: Beverly Seaton

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2012-10-10

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 9780813934532

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The author traces the phenomenon of ascribing sentimental meaning to floral imagery from its beginnings in Napoleonic France through its later transformations in England and America. At the heart of the book is a depiction of what the three most important flower books from each of the countries divulge about the period and the respective cultures. Seaton shows that the language of flowers was not a single and universally understood correlation of flowers to meanings that men and women used to communicate in matters of love and romance. The language differs from book to book, country to country. To place the language of flowers in social and literary perspective, the author examines the nineteenth-century uses of flowers in everyday life and in ceremonies and rituals and provides a brief history of floral symbolism. She also discusses the sentimental flower book, a genre especially intended for female readers. Two especially valuable features of the book are its table of correlations of flowers and their meanings from different sourcebooks and its complete bibliography of language of flower titles. This book will appeal not only to scholars in Victorian studies and women's studies but also to art historians, book collectors, museum curators, historians of horticulture, and anyone interested in nineteenth-century popular culture.

Relative Races
Relative Races

Author: Brigitte Fielder

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-09-21

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1478012684

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In Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder presents an alternative theory of how race is ascribed. Contrary to notions of genealogies by which race is transmitted from parents to children, the examples Fielder discusses from nineteenth-century literature, history, and popular culture show how race can follow other directions: Desdemona becomes less than fully white when she is smudged with Othello's blackface, a white woman becomes Native American when she is adopted by a Seneca family, and a mixed-race baby casts doubt on the whiteness of his mother. Fielder shows that the genealogies of race are especially visible in the racialization of white women, whose whiteness often depends on their ability to reproduce white family and white supremacy. Using black feminist and queer theories, Fielder presents readings of personal narratives, novels, plays, stories, poems, and images to illustrate how interracial kinship follows non-heteronormative, non-biological, and non-patrilineal models of inheritance in nineteenth-century literary culture.

The Slave's Little Friends
The Slave's Little Friends

Author: Carme Manuel

Publisher: Universitat de València

Published: 2022-04-13

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 8491349618

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The texts included in this anthology illustrate the wide range of possibilities that abolitionist writings offered to American children during the first half of the nineteenth century. Composing their works under the wings of the antislavery movement, authors responded to the unequal and controversial development of abolitionist politics during the decades that led up to the outbreak of the Civil War. These writers struggled to teach children “to feel right,” and attempted to instruct them to actively respond to the injustice of the slavery system as rendered visible by a harrowing visual archive of suffering bodies compiled by both English and American antislavery promoters. Reading was equated with knowledge and knowledge was equated with moral responsibility, and therefore reading about “the abominations of slavery” became an act of emotional personal transformation. Children were thus turned into powerful agents of political change and potential activists to spread the abolitionist message. Invited to comply with a higher law that entailed the breaking of their nation’s edicts, they were morally rewarded by the Christian God and approvingly applauded by their elders for their violation of these same American regulations. These texts enclosed immeasurable value for young nineteenth-century Americans to fulfill a more democratic and egalitarian role in their future. Undoubtedly, abolitionist writings for children took away American children’s innocence and transformed them into juvenile abolitionists and empowered compassionate citizens.