TY - BOOK AU - Williams,Susan S. TI - Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 185-19 SN - 9780812239423 U1 - 810.9928709034 PY - 2013///] CY - Philadelphia : PB - University of Pennsylvania Press, KW - American literature KW - 19th century KW - History and criticism KW - Women authors KW - Authorship KW - Women and literature KW - United States KW - History KW - Cultural Studies KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General KW - bisacsh KW - Literature N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Preface --; 1. Defining Female Authorship --; 2. Writing in and out of the Home: Parlor Culture and Authorship --; 3. Authorizing Reception: Maria Cummins and The Lamplighter --; 4. Revising Romance: Louisa May Alcott, Hawthorne, and the Civil War --; 5. Contractual Authorship: Elizabeth Keckley and Mary Abigail Dodge --; 6. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Ethical Authorship --; 7. Epilogue: Amateurs and Professionals in Woolson and James --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index --; Acknowledgments; restricted access; Issued also in print N2 - There was, in the nineteenth century, a distinction made between "writers" and "authors," Susan S. Williams notes, the former defined as those who composed primarily from mere experience or observation rather than from the unique genius or imagination of the latter. If women were more often cast as writers than authors by the literary establishment, there also emerged in magazines, advice books, fictional accounts, and letters a specific model of female authorship, one that valorized "natural" feminine traits such as observation and emphasis on detail, while also representing the distance between amateur writing and professional authorship.Attending to biographical and cultural contexts and offering fresh readings of literary works, Reclaiming Authorship focuses on the complex ways writers such as Maria S. Cummins, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Abigail Dodge, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson put this model of female authorship into practice. Williams shows how it sometimes intersected with prevailing notions of male authorship and sometimes diverged from them, and how it is often precisely those moments of divergence when authorship was reclaimed by women.The current trend to examine "women writers" rather than "authors" marks a full rotation of the circle, and "writers" can indeed be the more capacious term, embracing producers of everything from letters and diaries to published books. Yet certain nineteenth-century women made particular efforts to claim the title "author," Williams demonstrates, and we miss something of significance by ignoring their efforts UR - https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812203899 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780812203899 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780812203899/original ER -