Machine generated contents note: Introduction -- 1. Why Read More Southworth -- 2. Stephens and the Serial Novel -- 3. Women in Nineteenth-Century Prisons -- 4. Mary Jane Holmes's "Spooneys," "Crackers," and "White Niggers" -- 5. Laura Jean Libbey and Sexual Transformation -- 6. Racial Intimacy and Serial Novels -- Conclusion
Summary
"Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels explores the prolific careers of four exemplary novelists-E.D.E.N. Southworth, Ann Stephens, Mary Jane Holmes, and Laura Jean Libbey. These commercially successful writers helped to shape the popular tradition of serial magazine fiction by drawing on readers' tastes along with their cultural concerns. Their astonishing productivity led magazine editors and publishers to return to them repeatedly for more serials to be turned into even more novels, even as they reprinted these fictions under new titles. Dale Bauer analyzes how serials deployed the repetition of plots and the traumas representing the sources of women's anxieties and pain. Arguing that these novels provided temporary resolutions to the social, economic, and psychological tensions that readers faced, Bauer explains how this otherwise forgotten archive of fiction now offers an extraordinarily expanded range of women's literary effort from the nineteenth to the twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes
Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on January 24, 2020)
