Secret Histories

Auteur

Kathleen Diffley (Editor)
KATHLEEN DIFFLEY is professor emerita at the University of Iowa and director of the Civil War Caucus at the M/MLA. She is the author of Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861-1876 and the coeditor of Visions of Glory: The Civil War in Word and Image (both Georgia). She lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Caroline Gebhard (Editor)
CAROLINE GEBHARD is professor of English at Tuskegee University. She is a founding member of the Woolson Society and co-editor (with Barbara McCaskill) of Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919. She lives in Auburn, AL. Cheryl B. Torsney (Editor)
CHERYL B. TORSNEY is Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and professor of English at Temple University. She is the author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry and co-editor of Quilt Culture: Tracing the Pattern. She lives in Philadelphia, PA.

Texte du rabat

"From the Great Lakes to the defeated South and across storied Europe to the Mediterranean, the eighteen essays in this volume explore Woolson's prodigious range as the whole of her professional life comes alive in the volume's triptych. The first section, "A Writer's Experiments," reveals that Woolson's play with genres and casts began during the 1870s and extended until she died in 1894. Consistently, she tested the limits on representing women's labors as well as their erotic appeal. The second section, "Postbellum Souths," follows Woolson's travels through a land ravaged by war and injustice. Drawing upon theories of travel, collective memory, the Lost Cause, religious controversy, and a race-bound region, these essays expose both the smugness of visitors and the agendas of residents that Woolson was among the first postwar writers to portray. The third section, "Through an International Lens," considers expatriate perceptions of European and Mediterranean cultures as well as misconceptions about the Gilded Age U.S. Here and throughout this collection, travel sketches mingle with fiction and poetry, while encounters with the writing of other Americans on the move demonstrate how often Woolson made her century's literary terrain more subtle and complex"--