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Phase, after mid-century, it is largely taken over by women writers? What are we to make of the reverse pattern in the novel of cross-sectional comparison, naturalized into America by women writers (Maria Sedgwick, Sarah Hale, Harriet Beecher Store) but captured after the Civil War by male writers (John W. DeForest, Henry James in The Bostonians, later William Faulkner in Light in August), in whose hands what had been primarily a socio-historical inquiry becomes narrowed down to a misogynistically-framed sexual battle between the representatives of north and south? What are we to make of the fact that some American genres criss-cross gender lines quite fluidly (the jeremiad, the captivity, the hymn)? A comprehensive American literary history would not necessarily want to put these gender-specific questions at the very head of its discussion of American genres, but its understanding of genre as a historically significant variable would benefit from having considered them.
Sixth, feminist revisionary study should force us to confront and explain the surprising (to those educated in the pre-feminist era) priority of women writers in so many areas of subsequent national literary achievement. The first producers of work in quantity (in some cases quality also) in American poetry, drama, and fiction were Anne Bradstreet, Mercy Otis Warren, and Susanna Haswell Rowson. Another American woman wrote the first best-seller in American prose, founding a genre in the process (Mary Rowlandson); another wrote the nineteenth-century’s biggest seller and most influential political novel (Harriet Beecher Stowe); another became arguably the greatest woman poet in the English language (Emily Dickinson). All this in spite of the fast that American women at no point down through the mid-nineteenth century probably constituted more than one-quarter of publishing authors. These instances, notwithstanding, of female priority suggest that whatever the degree of social patriarchalism, whatever the demographic skewing in the percentage of women as published writers, women probably functioned as the carriers and custodians of vernacular literary culture in premodern America to a greater degree than we have yet realized.
Finally, to return to the specific subject of canonicity, feminist revisionism will not and probably should not do away with the