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Claiming the Pen : Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South / Catherine Kerrison.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2015]Copyright date: ©2015Description: 1 online resource (288 p.) : 5 halftonesContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780801454332
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 305.48/9630975 22
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources:
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Toward an Intellectual History of Early Southern Women -- 2. “The Truest Kind of Breeding”: Prescriptive Literature in the Early South -- 3. Religion, Voice, and Authority -- 4. Reading Novels in the South -- 5. Reading, Race, and Writing -- Conclusion: The Enduring Problem of Female Authorship and Authority -- Postscript -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Index
Summary: In 1711, the imperious Virginia patriarch William Byrd II spitefully refused his wife Lucy's plea for a book; a century later, Lady Jean Skipwith placed an order that sent the Virginia bookseller Joseph Swan scurrying to please. These vignettes bracket a century of change in white southern women's lives. Claiming the Pen offers the first intellectual history of early southern women. It situates their reading and writing within the literary culture of the wider Anglo-Atlantic world, thus far understood to be a masculine province, even as they inhabited the limited, provincial social circles of the plantation South.Catherine Kerrison uncovers a new realm of female education in which conduct-of-life advice—both the dry pedantry of sermons and the risqué plots of novels—formed the core reading program. Women, she finds, learned to think and write by reading prescriptive literature, not Greek and Latin classics, in impromptu home classrooms, rather than colleges and universities, and from kin and friends, rather than schoolmates and professors. Kerrison also reveals that southern women, in their willingness to "take up the pen" and so claim new rights, seized upon their racial superiority to offset their gender inferiority. In depriving slaves of education, southern women claimed literacy as a privilege of their whiteness, and perpetuated and strengthened the repressive institutions of slavery.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780801454332

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Toward an Intellectual History of Early Southern Women -- 2. “The Truest Kind of Breeding”: Prescriptive Literature in the Early South -- 3. Religion, Voice, and Authority -- 4. Reading Novels in the South -- 5. Reading, Race, and Writing -- Conclusion: The Enduring Problem of Female Authorship and Authority -- Postscript -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

In 1711, the imperious Virginia patriarch William Byrd II spitefully refused his wife Lucy's plea for a book; a century later, Lady Jean Skipwith placed an order that sent the Virginia bookseller Joseph Swan scurrying to please. These vignettes bracket a century of change in white southern women's lives. Claiming the Pen offers the first intellectual history of early southern women. It situates their reading and writing within the literary culture of the wider Anglo-Atlantic world, thus far understood to be a masculine province, even as they inhabited the limited, provincial social circles of the plantation South.Catherine Kerrison uncovers a new realm of female education in which conduct-of-life advice—both the dry pedantry of sermons and the risqué plots of novels—formed the core reading program. Women, she finds, learned to think and write by reading prescriptive literature, not Greek and Latin classics, in impromptu home classrooms, rather than colleges and universities, and from kin and friends, rather than schoolmates and professors. Kerrison also reveals that southern women, in their willingness to "take up the pen" and so claim new rights, seized upon their racial superiority to offset their gender inferiority. In depriving slaves of education, southern women claimed literacy as a privilege of their whiteness, and perpetuated and strengthened the repressive institutions of slavery.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Apr 2024)