NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS
BC 3997x, sec.4 Fall 2003
Monday 2:10-4:00 pm  Barnard 407

Professor Lisa Gordis
Office: Barnard Hall 408D
Office phone: 854-2114
Mailbox: Barnard Hall 417

Office hours: Wednesdays 1:15-2:45 and by appointment
lgordis@barnard.columbia.edu
http://www.columbia.edu/~lmg21

This seminar considers a variety of texts by nineteenth-century American women. Many of these texts were tremendously popular in the nineteenth century, but until quite recently have been largely ignored by twentieth-century critics. In the past three decades, however, critics have rediscovered these texts, and have considered them from a wide range of critical perspectives. As we examine the texts of the "d—d mob of scribbling women," we'll sample a range of critical approaches as well, testing and evaluating critical paradigms as we proceed. The issues that we'll consider include domesticity and women's sphere, domestic space and women's time, political action and suffrage, the economics of writing and publishing, sentimentality and anger, and the problem of evaluating literary merit.