Fanny Kemble's Journals, Edited and with an Introduction by Catherine Clinton

Fanny Kemble's Journals, Edited and with an Introduction by Catherine Clinton
Author: Fanny Kemble
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674039475

Henry James called Fanny Kemble's autobiography "one of the most animated autobiographies in the language." Born into the first family of the British stage, Fanny Kemble was one of the most famous woman writers of the English-speaking world, a best-selling author on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to her essays, poetry, plays, and a novel, Kemble published six works of memoir, eleven volumes in all, covering her life, which began in the first decade of the nineteenth century and ended in the last. Her autobiographical writings are compelling evidence of Kemble's wit and talent, and they also offer a dazzling overview of her transatlantic world. Kemble kept up a running commentary in letters and diaries on the great issues of her day. The selections here provide a narrative thread tracing her intellectual development-especially her views on women and slavery. She is famous for her identification with abolitionism, and many excerpts reveal her passionate views on the subject. The selections show a life full of personal tragedy as well as professional achievements. An elegant introduction provides a context for appreciating Kemble's remarkable life and achievements, and the excerpts from her journals allow her, once again, to speak for herself.

Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World

Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World
Author: Christine DeVine
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2016-05-06
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1317087305

With cheaper publishing costs and the explosion of periodical publishing, the influence of New World travel narratives was greater during the nineteenth century than ever before, as they offered an understanding not only of America through British eyes, but also a lens though which nineteenth-century Britain could view itself. Despite the differences in purpose and method, the writers and artists discussed in Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World-from Fanny Wright arriving in America in 1818 to the return of Henry James in 1904, and including Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Isabella Bird, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Martineau, and Robert Louis Stevenson among others, as well as artists such as Eyre Crowe-all contributed to the continued building of America as a construct for audiences at home. These travelers' stories and images thus presented an idea of America over which Britons could crow about their own supposed sophistication, and a democratic model through which to posit their own future, all of which suggests the importance of transatlantic travel writing and the ’idea of America’ to nineteenth-century Britain.

Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Embodied Book

Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Embodied Book
Author: Professor Jessica DeSpain
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2014-09-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1472405676

Until the Chace Act in 1891, no international copyright law existed between Britain and the United States, which meant publishers were free to edit text, excerpt whole passages, add new illustrations, and substantially redesign a book's appearance. In spite of this ongoing process of transatlantic transformation of texts, the metaphor of the book as a physical embodiment of its author persisted. Jessica DeSpain's study of this period of textual instability examines how the physical book acted as a major form of cultural exchange between Britain and the United States that called attention to volatile texts and the identities they manifested. Focusing on four influential works—Charles Dickens's American Notes for General Circulation, Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, and Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas—DeSpain shows that for authors, readers, and publishers struggling with the unpredictability of the textual body, the physical book and the physical body became interchangeable metaphors of flux. At the same time, discourses of destabilized bodies inflected issues essential to transatlantic culture, including class, gender, religion, and slavery, while the practice of reprinting challenged the concepts of individual identity, personal property, and national identity.

Georgia Women

Georgia Women
Author: Ann Short Chirhart
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2010-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820339008

This first of two volumes extends from the founding of the colony of Georgia in 1733 up to the Progressive era. From the beginning, Georgia women were instrumental in shaping the state, yet most histories minimize their contributions. The essays in this volume include women of many ethnicities and classes who played an important role in Georgia’s history. Though sources for understanding the lives of women in Georgia during the colonial period are scarce, the early essays profile Mary Musgrove, an important player in the relations between the Creek nation and the British Crown, and the loyalist Elizabeth Johnston, who left Georgia for Nova Scotia in 1806. Another essay examines the near-mythical quality of the American Revolution-era accounts of "Georgia's War Woman," Nancy Hart. The later essays are multifaceted in their examination of the way different women experienced Georgia's antebellum social and political life, the tumult of the Civil War, and the lingering consequences of both the conflict itself and Emancipation. After the war, both necessity and opportunity changed women's lives, as educated white women like Eliza Andrews established or taught in schools and as African American women like Lucy Craft Laney, who later founded the Haines Institute, attended school for the first time. Georgia Women also profiles reform-minded women like Mary Latimer McLendon, Rebecca Latimer Felton, Mildred Rutherford, Nellie Peters Black, and Martha Berry, who worked tirelessly for causes ranging from temperance to suffrage to education. The stories of the women portrayed in this volume provide valuable glimpses into the lives and experiences of all Georgia women during the first century and a half of the state's existence. Historical figures include: Mary Musgrove Nancy Hart Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston Ellen Craft Fanny Kemble Frances Butler Leigh Susie King Taylor Eliza Frances Andrews Amanda America Dickson Mary Ann Harris Gay Rebecca Latimer Felton Mary Latimer McLendon Mildred Lewis Rutherford Nellie Peters Black Lucy Craft Laney Martha Berry Corra Harris Juliette Gordon Low

Southern History across the Color Line, Second Edition

Southern History across the Color Line, Second Edition
Author: Nell Irvin Painter
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2021-02-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469663775

The color line, once all too solid in southern public life, still exists in the study of southern history. As distinguished historian Nell Irvin Painter notes, we often still write about the South as though people of different races occupied entirely different spheres. In truth, although blacks and whites were expected to remain in their assigned places in the southern social hierarchy throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, their lives were thoroughly entangled. In this powerful collection of pathbreaking essays, Painter reaches across the color line to examine how race, gender, class, and individual subjectivity shaped the lives of black and white women and men in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. She explores such themes as interracial sex, white supremacy, and the physical and psychological violence of slavery, using insights gleaned from psychology and feminist social science as well as social, cultural, and intellectual history. The book illustrates both the breadth of Painter's interests and the originality of her intellectual contributions. This edition features refreshed essays and a new preface that sheds light on the development of Painter's thought and our continued struggles with racism in the twenty-first century.

Neither Ballots Nor Bullets

Neither Ballots Nor Bullets
Author: Wendy Hamand Venet
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1991
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813913421

This account of women's abolitionist activity during the Civil War offers new evidence of the extent of women's political activism and insightfully reveals the historical significance of this activism. Through the Woman's National Loyal League, women were introduced into the political sphere from which they had previously been barred. The work of women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opened new avenues for feminist activism after the war. In her analysis Wendy Hamand Venet examines how the rift in the league influenced the feminist movement positively by impelling its leaders to distinguish their cause from other political concerns and place it in the spotlight.