Reclaiming the Non-Canonical Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Since the 1970s critics have been reclaiming nineteenth-century popular women's literature from the label it received at the hands of canonical great Nathaniel Hawthorne: "a damned mob of scribbling women." Nina Baym's Women's Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America, 1820-1870 was instrumental in this effort, and as Baym points out, the categories of popular literature and women's literature often overlapped in the nineteenth century when women writers writing for women dominated the American literary marketplace. Anne Sophie Riepma's Fire & Fiction: Augusta Jane Evans in Context contributes to the reclamation of nineteenth-century popular women writers by exploring the works of one of the most popular ones. Two other new studies, however, broaden the critical net slightly by including popular male writers of the nineteenth century and a rather unpopular female writer. Alice Fahs, in The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861-1865, records and analyzes the most popular works written by men and women and for an audience of men, women, and children during the Civil War, and Stephen Howard Browne, in Angelina Grimké: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical [End Page 155] Imagination, examines one of the most important women writers and orators of the nineteenth century who was more infamous than popular.