Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women's Writing (American Literatures Initiative)

Product description Review "All scholars interested in how print cultures matter to gendered analyses of texts or to the politics of literary history and recovery would do well to seek out these studies." --Dorri Beam, Syracuse UniversityBetween the Novel and the News contains insightful readings of both fiction and newspapers and presents a range of female authors in a consistently clear style that makes one look forward to future work by this scholar.-- "Nineteenth-Century Prose"Cogently combining thorough historical analysis, creative readings of literary symbolism, and forceful applications of feminist thought, [Edelstein] shows once again how the achievements of women writers have been underestimated and what their work contributes to our understanding of the relation between journalism and fiction in the nineteenth century.-- "Review 19"Edelstein demonstrates a deep sensitivity to the messiness of the relationship between fact and fiction... As a result, [her] analysis shows us a great deal about anxieties, ambivalence, and contradiction rather than making grand statements or drawing clear lines of connection or difference... This, too, expresses a kind of truth often ignored in traditional historiography.-- "American Periodicals"Edelstein's Between the Novel and the News entirely reboots our sense of how and why American women's writing emerged. With verve and wit, Edelstein argues that women's writing did not arise from cultural concerns centered on their roles in the private sphere but rather as a reaction to their exclusion from the public sphere of debate and critical engagement, which in the nineteenth century, came to be centered in the news industry. This fresh new view reveals that the social consciousness, ethical critique, and gendered strategies long associated with women writers did not emerge out of the sweet generosities of hearth and home but rather out of protest overexclusion from public discourse, outrage over the representational politics of the media, and a staunch gendered critique of rationalist, empirical modes of inquiry styled as "objective" and "universal" by the news industry.-- "Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature"This important book advances the knowledge about women's writing within a frame that both recognizes the traditional canonical values of aesthetics, complexity, and artistry and goes beyond those traditional values to examine cultural context, ideologies of gender and race, and artificial distinctions between various kinds of 'texts.'--Nicole Tonkovich, University of California, author of Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret FullerWhat I find most invigorating about Between the Novel and the News is Edelstein's intellectual daring: her own literary criticism replicates the characteristics of the women she writes about. In each chapter, she makes claims about texts that initially might seem playful or even far- fetched, only to elucidate her interpretations in ways that are enormously compelling and truly thrilling.-- "Legacy: Journal of American Women Writers" About the Author Sari Edelstein is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.