Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women's Writing

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. She was a reader of the Springfield Republican and the Amherst Record as well as numerous periodicals, including the Atlantic Monthly. See Cristanne Miller, Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2012). Roger Lundin notes that the Dickinson household subscribed to fifteen newspapers and magazines, including the Springfield Daily Republican. See Lundin, Emily Dickinson and Art of Belief (Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 1998). Also, see Jack L. Capps’s Emily Dickinson’s Reading, 1836–1886 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1966). 2. Examples include “This Is My Letter to the World,” “How News Must Feel When Traveling,” “Publication Is the Auction,” “I’m Nobody,” and “Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant.” See Jerusha McCormack Hull, “Domesticating Delphi: Emily Dickinson and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph,” American Quarterly 55.4 (2003): 569–601; and Eliza Richards’s “‘How News Must Feel When Traveling’: Dickinson and Civil War Media,” in A Companion to Emily Dickinson, ed. Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 157–79. See also Shannon L. Thomas, “‘What News Must Think When Pondering’: Emily Dickinson, the Springfield Daily Republican, and the Poetics of Mass Communication,” Emily Dickinson Journal 19.1 (2010): 60–79. 3. Dickinson anticipates William Carlos Williams’s well-known lines, “It is difficult to get the news from poems / yet men die every day for lack of what is found there.” 4. In the classic study Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989), David Reynolds theorizes the reciprocal relationship between mass culture and canonical American literature, establishing that works by even the most reclusive and elitist authors, such as Hawthorne, were shaped by popular ephemeral literatures, such as newspapers and pamphlets. According to Reynolds, “During the American Renaissance literariness resulted not from a rejection of socio-literary context but rather from a full assimilation and transformation of key images and devices from this 156 / notes to introduction context” (7). Similarly, Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (New York: Oxford UP, 1985) identifies journalism’s decisive role in shaping the careers of major writers, such as Whitman and Twain, but she focuses exclusively on male writers and does not discuss gender as a motivating or regulating discourse. Fishkin’s more recent book, Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2009), acknowledges that many women writers made the same transition from journalism to fiction that canonical male writers did. Doug Underwood’s Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000 (New York: Cambridge UP, 2008) and Mark Canada’s Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America: Thoreau, Stowe, and Their Contemporaries Respond to the Rise of the Commercial Press (New York: Palgrave, 2011) offer compelling accounts of how literary and journalistic traditions competed in the project of documenting social realities, but neither of these studies considers gender. 5. Canada, Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America, 1. 6. A handful of recent studies have sparked interest in the intersection of gender and journalism at the turn of the twentieth century, namely, Karen Roggenkamp’s Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers and Fiction (Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2005) and Jean Marie Lutes’s Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880– 1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2006). 7. “Cultural work” comes from Jane Tompkins’s classic study Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford UP, 1986), which redefined the American literary canon by focusing on the world-making potential of popular novels. 8. Lennard Davis uses the formulation “news/novels discourse” to describe the origins of the English novel; his work has been instrumental to my thinking about the intersections between these forms. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997), 49. In the context of increasingly stringent libel laws, Davis argues that fiction served as “a ploy to mask the genuine ideological, reportorial, commentative function of the novel” (213). The news/novels discourse enabled pamphlets and ballads to conceal their illicit, controversial engagement with current events. 9. Claire Pettengill writes, “Accustomed as we are to consider the newspaper as a source or origin of ‘higher’ literary forms, especially the novel, we lack productive ways to think about a literary relationship, such as the one between newspapers and novels...