Vashti; Or, Until Death Us Do Part

Vashti; Or, Until Death Us Do Part

Author: Augusta J. Evans

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2021-04-25

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13:

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Vashti or, Until Death Us Do Part is a book by Augusta Jane Evans. It depicts a romantic story of old times where women were quiet and candid, where an orphaned girl called Salome falls in love with a doctor from another culture.


Butterfly, the Bride

Butterfly, the Bride

Author: Carol Weisbrod

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2009-09-11

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0472022849

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Carol Weisbrod uses a variety of stories to raise important questions about how society, through law, defines relationships in the family. Beginning with a story most familiar from the opera Madame Butterfly, Weisbrod addresses issues such as marriage, divorce, parent-child relations and abuses, and non-marital intimate contact. Each chapter works with fiction or narratives inspired by biography or myth, ranging from the Book of Esther to the stories of Kafka. Weisbrod frames the book with running commentary on variations of the Madame Butterfly story, showing the ways in which fiction better expresses the complexities of intimate lives than does the language of the law. Butterfly, the Bride looks at law from the outside, using narrative to provide a fresh perspective on the issues of law and social structure---and individual responses to law. This book thoroughly explores relationships between inner and public lives by examining what is ordinarily classified as the sphere of private life---the world of family relationships. Carol Weisbrod is Ellen Ash Peters Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut. Her other books include The Boundaries of Utopia and Emblems of Pluralism.


Plots and Proposals

Plots and Proposals

Author: Karen Tracey

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780252068393

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"Boy meets girl. Boy proposes to girl. Girl refuses proposal. Then what?This provocative scenario provides the frame for a significant countertradition in popular nineteenth-century women's novels: the double-proposal plot, in which the heroine rejects and later accepts proposals from the same suitor. Exploring the American wing of this movement through the novels of Carolyn Hentz, Augusta Evans, Laura J. Curtis Bullard, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Karen Tracey investigates how each of these writers is constrained by her historical circumstances and how she uses her fiction to critique those circumstances.Pioneered in Britain by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the double-proposal plot dislodges the myth of Mr. Right and questions the all-powerful notions of true love and happily-ever-after. When the heroine rejects her suitor's initial proposal, she opens up the possibility of renegotiating the terms of the relationship and exploring alternative roles. By considering two possible marriages between the same set of partners, the double-proposal plot interrogates the role of middle-class women in courtship and in public life as well as the quality of married life and the influence a woman potentially brings to it. Tracey charts the genre's evolution from novels that seek answers within renegotiated marriages to those that challenge the efficacy of marriage itself. Reconstructing some of the cultural circumstances that would have influenced the writing, publishing, and reading of the novels, Plots and Proposals examines how changing notions of love and romance both inform and are critiqued by this renegade fiction."


The Life and Works of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, 1835-1909

The Life and Works of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, 1835-1909

Author: Brenda Ayres

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1317025563

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Over the course of her 57-year career, Augusta Jane Evans Wilson published nine best-selling novels, but her significant contributions to American literature have until recently gone largely unrecognized. Brenda Ayres, in her long overdue critical biography of the novelist once referred to as the 'first Southern woman to enter the field of American letters,' credits the importance of Wilson's novels for their portrait of nineteenth-century America. As Ayres reminds us, the nineteenth-century American book market was dominated by women writers and women readers, a fact still to some extent obscured by the make-up of the literary canon. In placing Wilson's novels firmly within their historical context, Ayres commemorates Wilson as both a storyteller and maker of American history. Proceeding chronologically, Ayres devotes a chapter to each of Wilson's novels, showing how her views on Catholicism, the South, the Civil War, male authority, domesticity, Reconstruction, and race were both informed by and resistant to the turbulent times in which she lived. This comprehensive and meticulously researched biography contributes not only to our appreciation of Wilson's work, but also to her importance as a figure for understanding women's roles in history and their art, evolving gender roles, and the complicated status of women writers.


Fire & Fiction

Fire & Fiction

Author: Anne Sophie Riepma

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-10-18

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9004488847

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Augusta Jane Evans, a nineteenth-century writer from the American South, produced bestsellers in the genre of the domestic novel, popular between the 1820s and 1880s. Evans was particularly good in creating strong and independent heroines. She is best known for her blockbuster St. Elmo (1866), featuring the love story of Edna Earl and the passionate St. Elmo Murray. In Fire and Fiction: Augusta Jane Evans in Context Anne Sophie Riepma reconstructs the literary, cultural, religious, social, and historical contexts of Evans's work. She explores the author's relation to her times and focuses on the way her novels reflect and address the cultural experiences of Southern women. Riepma pays particular attention to topics such as the ideology of domesticity, domestic fiction, the concept of “woman's sphere,” women's role in society, middle-class culture, education and employment for women, religion, reform, political developments, and the Confederate War.


Woman's Fiction

Woman's Fiction

Author: Nina Baym

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780252062858

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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