Late-19th-Century Literature

Writings by and about women feature most prominently this year, with works by a wide variety of authors being taken into consideration. Of particular note is the significant biographical and critical attention paid to authors such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Mary Hallock Foote, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, among others. In light of this year's strong emphasis on women, the continuing paucity of scholarship on Sarah Orne Jewett's writings is noteworthy, which suggests that perhaps critics once interested in her work have turned their attention elsewhere. A generation of innovative Jewett studies may have made this move possible, but analysis of Jewett's work as a discrete field has not kept pace. Scholarship on Charles Chesnutt continues to appear at its usually strong rate, as do analyses of the fiction of Stephen Crane and W. D. Howells. A pair of innovative studies in African American history and culture promises to redefine the field significantly, while the literary study of the Civil War also points in new directions, particularly in discussions of the war's impact on regions other than the South.

i. Women and Literature

While not very detailed in its readings of individual texts, Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers certainly helps to demonstrate the keynote theme of this year's scholarship. Overall, this book offers a comprehensive summary of the trends and accomplishments in the history of literature by American women. With respect to the late 19th century, Showalter frames her brief discussions of writers from the period by addressing themes such as the turn to spiritualism and feminism after the Civil War, regionalism, the ways in which various generations have depicted "the coming woman" or "the New Woman," and the ways in which racial and ethnic concerns begin to dovetail with feminism and the emergence of new publication and distribution technologies. Much emphasis is given to these thematic and topical concerns, with formal advances and influences also attracting attention amid the discussions of such authors as Rebecca Harding Davis, Helen Hunt Jackson, Kate Chopin, Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Mary Murfree, Constance Woolson, Pauline Hopkins, Elizabeth Phelps, Gilman, and more than a dozen others. The overall presentation of these writers within a broad set of historical and aesthetic movements is certainly useful, a contextualization that reminds one of the richness and complexity of the period's literary offerings.

That complexity is rendered through a particularly engaging new angle in Charlotte J. Rich's Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era (Missouri), which approaches the literary response to the ideal of the New Woman from the point of view of the multiethnic woman writer. In analyses that include the works of Pauline Hopkins and S. Alice Callahan, Rich covers a body of texts that may ascribe to and reproduce the ideal but do so in ways that are critical of its restrictive tenets while taking advantage of the ideal's promise of increased political and social freedom. Thus the battles engaged on behalf of racial and ethnic identity become possible in part through selective/tactical appropriation of dialogues specific to feminism. In the case of Callahan, for instance, Native American rights are addressed through feminist politics, while Hopkins's deployment of the ideal enables her attacks on racial oppression. Hopkins also figures in Colleen C. O'Brien's "'Blacks in All Quarters of the Globe': Anti-Imperialism, Insurgent Cosmopolitanism, and International Labor in Pauline Hopkins's Literary Journalism" (AQ 61: 245-70). The author of this essay challenges the prevailing notion of Hopkins as a conventional author, proposing instead that she was a radical, anticapitalist socialist whose writings prove to have been a formative influence on later African American radicalism. Also interested in the expression of political outrage, Martha Solomon Watson's "Mary Church Terrell vs. Thomas Nelson Page: Gender, Race, and Class in Anti-Lynching Rhetoric" (RPA 12: 65-90) argues that in seeking to refute a North American Review essay by Page, Terrell resorted in the pages of the same magazine to a rhetorical logic that only managed to reinforce the class and racial "prejudices...