Reviewed by: The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women’s Circuit, 1876–1910 by Ronald Briggs Ana Peluffo KEYWORDS Transatlantic Networks, Sentimentality, Affect, Literary Salons, Ronald Briggs, Matto de Turner, Gorriti, Pedagogy, Sisterhood, Hemispheric Americanism ronald briggs. The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women’s Circuit, 1876–1910. Vanderbilt UP, 2017, 254 pp. Ronald’s Briggs The Moral Electricity of Print could not be timelier in its publication. It comes at a time when debates on transnational networks, feminism and cross-border politics have achieved renewed urgency in the academy, motorized in part by the Ni Una Menos movement in Latin America, and the rampant xenophobia and misogyny of the Trump administration. Briggs’s compelling and historically grounded reading of the Veladas Literarias, a feminist salon hosted in Lima by Juana Manuela Gorriti in 1876–1877 and revived by Clorinda Matto de Turner after the War of the Pacific blurs national borders by showing that many of the cultural conversations that took place there were hemispheric and international in scope. His engaging take on Gorriti’s salons as the epicenter of a trans-national gendered network that stretches its elastic borders across nations calls attention to the ways in which Peruvian debates on nation-building and women’s education intersected with global conversations in the US and Europe on the same topics. The main argument of the book is that for writers of Gorriti’s generation literature was not a formal endeavor based on fixed notions of aesthetic purity but rather a messy political terrain in which boundaries between pedagogy and art, reason and sentiment, politics and aesthetics were often blurred. Briggs weaves into his archive an impressive range of transnational sources that he is careful to contextualize and situate at the local level. In the book, he combines close readings of works by Gorriti, Matto de Turner, González de Fanning, Beecher Stowe, Serrano de Wilson, and Acosta de Samper, among others, with theoretical discussions on the circulation, translation, and appropriation of books and ideas across national borders. Drawing upon a variety of theoretical sources—including cosmopolitanism, feminism, transnational theory, and post-colonial studies—he proposes new readings of nineteenth-century canonic and non-canonic texts “in which the burning literary question is pedagogical” (5). Awarded a prestigious award by the nineteenth-century LASA section for the best book of 2017 in the area of nineteenth-century cultural studies, the monograph is a welcome addition to cultural historians working in several interrelated and multidisciplinary fields of study. One of the strengths of the monograph is the idea that the transnational circulation of books resulted in the construction of diasporic cultural communities that became an alternative to the masculine lettered city. When discussing the pedagogical implications of salon culture, Briggs points out that in a society that was extremely hostile to women intellectuals, the feminized space of the tertulia became an oasis in which women could provide for themselves the mentorship [End Page 239] and support that society at large denied them at the institutional level. “As a marginalized minority within the field of literature,” he claims in the introduction, “women writers often linked group and individual success” (4). In order to trace the genealogy of the salonnière as a self-taught cultural hostess, Briggs studies the autobiographical writings of colonial and early nineteenth-century authors who relied on autodidacticism to build their intellectual personas. According to Briggs, women writers from the Lima cultural circle shared with their intellectual predecessors a utopian vision of the “teaching book” and the social novel that mimics the complex dynamics of the mentor-mentee relationship while acting as an extension of the classroom space. Rather than fetishizing the book as a diasporic material artefact, or the novel as a form, Briggs shows that nineteenth-century novels had much in common with textbooks, anthologies, and the journals in which they were often serialized. Whereas previous scholars have used the veladas to trace the genealogy of Peruvian feminism and to study conversations that took place there on women’s education, the feminization of civility, gender discrimination in the workforce, and suffragism, among other pressing topics, Briggs opts...
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Mar 23, 2021
Jennifer L Gauthier 
Open Access