Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization, and: Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930 (review)

Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization. Edited by Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. 296 pp. $50.00 /$25.00 paper.

Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930. Edited by Monika M. Elbert. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000. 307 pp. $39.95.

Recent approaches to periodization and gender open the door to explore a wide range of frequently overlooked women writers as well as to rethink those regularly anthologized alongside their male counterparts. Two recent essay collections, Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization and Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930, are particularly useful to consider the value or danger of revising (or even abandoning) traditional boundaries of gender, genre, and period in the established literary canon. The essays in both collections challenge critics to consider how a close study of women writers can "destabilize" existing boundaries and how "reframing," whether in the context of gender expectation or periodization, will affect our reading of women writers and of the canon as a whole. Perhaps the most striking contribution of these collections is the sheer diversity of the themes and writers covered. Despite the recovery of previously marginalized women writers, these collections bring to light unexplored works.

Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization offers a fresh perspective on the problem of the boundaries set by conventional literary periods. As Joyce W. Warren acknowledges in her introduction, Joan Kelly exposed the limitations of historical periods to convey women's experiences as far back as 1977 , yet it is clear that the same scrutiny has not recently been applied to literary classification in the United States. Skillfully edited by Warren and Margaret Dickie, this collection pushes readers to question categories that typically limit the thoughtful analysis of American women writers. The essays are organized into two sections: first "challenging boundaries" and second considering possibilities for reframing individual writers. In her introduction, Warren sums up the questions at the collection's heart:

If women writers break the boundaries of literary periods, can and should other periods be established? Is periodization even a useful organizational concept? More specifically, if some periods, such as realism or modernism, appear to be categories largely gendered as male, can they be expanded to include women writers or should they be abandoned altogether?

The essays in Section One of Challenging Boundaries reconsider a wide range of current categories. A summary of the subjects of these essays captures the scope of the collection: early women realists of the antebellum period, typically omitted from the category of American Literary Realism; nineteenth-century regionalist writers rarely recognized as having written "masterpieces" who redefine our understanding of nineteenth-century culture; African American women writers during the period of Reconstruction such as Frances Harper and Charlotte Forten; lesbian writers who define a new tradition in modernist poetry; black women writers who have been excluded from studies of the Harlem Renaissance because the period is so narrowly defined; and Asian American women writers who defy classification within the accepted periods designated in almost all literary anthologies.

Carla Peterson's lively essay, "Frances Harper, Charlotte Forten, and African American Literary Reconstruction," serves as a good example of the quality of these essays. Peterson complicates our understanding of a period in American literature that has excluded women writers because of the narrowness of its defining boundaries: Reconstruction. Writers such as Harper and Forten have not been included in discussions of this time period because they "refused to disassociate literary career from political participation" (40). Similarly, Warren's essay, "Performativity and the Repositioning of American Literary Realism," offers a probing reevaluation of realism through the examples of Caroline Kirkland, Fanny Fern, and Harriet Wilson, women who were writing in the genre of literary realism in the early to mid-nineteenth century, well before their male counterparts defined realism in male terms. As these...