The first woman in the republic : a cultural biography of Lydia Maria Child
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The first woman in the republic : a cultural biography of Lydia Maria Child
(New Americanists)
Duke University Press, 1994
- : [hbk]
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
For half a century Lydia Maria Child was a household name in the United States. Hardly a sphere of nineteenth-century life can be found in which Lydia Maria Child did not figure prominently as a pathbreaker. Although best known today for having edited Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she pioneered almost every department of nineteenth-century American letters-the historical novel, the short story, children's literature, the domestic advice book, women's history, antislavery fiction, journalism, and the literature of aging. Offering a panoramic view of a nation and culture in flux, this innovative cultural biography (originally published by Duke University Press in 1994) recreates the world as well as the life of a major nineteenth-figure whose career as a writer and social reformer encompassed issues central to American history.
Table of Contents
Illustrations ix
Preface and Acknowledgments xi
Chronology xix
Abbreviations xxvi
Prologue: A Passion for Books 1
1. The Author of Hobomok 16
2. Rebels and "Rivals": Self Portraits of a Conflicted Young Artist 38
3. The Juvenile Miscellany: The Creation of an American Children's Literature 57
4. A Marriage of True Minds: Espousing the Indian Cause 80
5. Blighted Prospects: Indian Fiction and Domestic Reality 101
6. The Frugal Housewife: Financial Worries and Domestic Advice 126
7. Children's Literature and Antislavery: Conservative Medium, Radical Message 151
8. "The First Woman in the Republic": An Antislavery Baptism 173
9. An Antislavery Marriage: Careers at Cross Purposes 195
10. The Conditions of Women: Double Binds, Unresolved Conflicts 214
11. Schisms, Personal and Political 249
12. The National Anti-Slavery Standard: Family Newspaper or Factional Organ? 267
13. Letters from New York: The Invention of a New Literary Genre 295
14. Sexuality and Marriage in Fact and Fiction 320
15. The Progress of Religious Ideas: A "Pilgrimage of Pennance" 356
16. Autumnal Leaves: Reconsecrated Partnerships, Personal and Political 384
17. The Example of John Brown 416
18. Child's Civil War 443
19. Visions of a Reconstructed America: The Freedmen's Book and A Romance of the Republic 487
20. A Radical Old Age 532
21. Aspirations of the World 573
Afterword 608
Notes 617
Works of Lydia Maria Child 757
Index 773
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