Archives of Labor

Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States

Lori Merish (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

328 Seiten

2017
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8223-6322-4 (ISBN)

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In Archives of Labor Lori Merish establishes working-class women as significant actors within literary culture, dramatically redrawing the map of nineteenth-century US literary and cultural history. Delving into previously unexplored archives of working-class women's literature-from autobiographies, pamphlet novels, and theatrical melodrama to seduction tales and labor periodicals-Merish recovers working-class women's vital presence as writers and readers in the antebellum era. Her reading of texts by a diverse collection of factory workers, seamstresses, domestic workers, and prostitutes boldly challenges the purportedly masculine character of class dissent during this era. Whether addressing portrayals of white New England "factory girls," fictional accounts of African American domestic workers, or the first-person narratives of Mexican women working in the missions of Mexican California, Merish unsettles the traditional association of whiteness with the working class to document forms of cross-racial class identification and solidarity. In so doing, she restores the tradition of working women's class protest and dissent, shows how race and gender are central to class identity, and traces the ways working women understood themselves and were understood as workers and class subjects.

Lori Merish is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University and the author of Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature, also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Factory Fictions: Lowell Mill Women and the Romance of Labor 33
2. Factory Labor and Literary Aesthetics: The Lowell Mill Girl, Popular Fiction, and the Proletarian Grotesque 73
3. Narrating Female Dependency: The Sentimental Seamstress and the Erotics of Labor Reform 113
4. Harriet Wilson's Our Nig and the Labor of Race 153
5. Hidden Hands: E.D.E.N. Southworth and Working-Class Performance 180
6. Writing Mexicana Workers: Race, Labor, and the Western Front 219
Postscript. Looking for Antebellum Workingwomen 247
Notes 251
Works Cited 285
Index 303

Erscheinungsdatum	13.05.2017
Zusatzinfo	7 illustrations
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
ISBN-10	0-8223-6322-4 / 0822363224
ISBN-13	978-0-8223-6322-4 / 9780822363224
Zustand	Neuware