Early-19th-Century Literature

The quantity of significant scholarship dealing with early-19th-century literature dropped noticeably again this year, continuing an unfortunate recent trend. Several publishers ignored requests for review copies, but fortunately a greater number of them cheerfully and generously provided books relevant to this chapter. Despite the relative dearth of material, however, scholars and students of the period will find books and articles that offer compelling insights into the period's fascinating literary culture. Important book-length studies discuss various themes, including the action-adventure heroine who transgresses social norms by leaving her domestic space to pursue independent adventure, and the ways environment and experience affect the attitudes expressed by individual authors regarding such issues as evolution, gynecology, abolitionism, feminism, and child-welfare reform. Thought-provoking journal articles address topics as diverse as conservatism in early American periodicals, American journals that helped British writers gain access to the increasingly important American literary marketplace, tourist guidebooks, abolitionist boycott literature, and antebellum slave narratives. Not surprisingly given the year's trends, only one book of merit examines Edgar Allan Poe, with brief but insightful chapters focusing on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, "The Man of the Crowd," and "The Gold-Bug." Other articles discuss authorial interpretation, ambiguity, aesthetics, plagiarism, voyeurism, blackface minstrelsy, and Poe's time in New York. Scholars examine Washington Irving's interest in Islam and his concept of "enterprise" in his work Astoria. Perhaps this year's most notable scholarly books, a new biography of Fredrick Douglass and a superb compilation of essays on Douglass's political views, stand as essential contributions to Douglass studies. Scholars also offer valuable perspectives on women writers. One book notes the influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's character Uncle Tom on subsequent black culture, and a collection of essays traces the transnational history of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Two articles provide commentary on heterosexuality and secularism, respectively, in Stowe's novels; others discuss various women writers including Anne Newport Royall, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Grace Greenwood, Maria Susanna Cummins, and Cora Wilburn; and one offers perspectives on Solomon Nunes Carvalho's western travel narrative.

i Period Studies

Only a few noteworthy period studies appear this year. Sandra Wilson Smith's The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895 (Tennessee) examines the ways writers removed heroines from the domestic space and portrayed them as pursuing independent adventure. Whereas previous critics have not devoted much attention to the female adventure tale, Smith's superb study notes the importance of this American narrative and its central figure. In lieu of maintaining a traditional household, Smith notes, these bold women are depicted as demonstrating tremendous physical strength, braving danger and even killing enemies when necessary, and she wants to "draw attention to the pervasiveness of this physically active, un-domesticated female hero." Although a number of the works discussed in Smith's book fall outside the scope of this chapter, The Action-Adventure Heroine offers detailed analysis of numerous 19th-century tales and novels written by both male and female authors. She includes among the period authors C. E. Grice, Sedgwick, Harry Halyard, and E. D. E. N. Southworth, and also analyzes some of the era's most popular anonymously penned works, with titles like The Female Marine, The Female Wanderer, The Female Warrior, and The Female Volunteer. Her analysis emphasizes how the action-adventure heroine in these authors and texts is given a central role in some of the nation's most significant cultural projects, including conquering the frontier, winning the nation's wars, expanding the country's geographical boundaries, building a stable nation, and protecting the community from criminal elements and sexual predators. From female soldiers and sailors to cross-dressing female warriors, the female protagonists portrayed by these writers are "as strong, agile, courageous, and clever as any heroic man." Smith notes that frontier tales portraying an active female hero attracted a very wide readership and that 19th-century American readers "breathlessly followed … this muscular heroine, demonstrating that popular representations of femininity were not monolithic." By establishing that this action heroine played an integral part in the development of...