272 American Literature
In light of the major contributions of feminist scholarship in expanding the canon and reinterpreting established texts, the History will stress the roles of women as writers and readers in American culture. This emphasis will occur in two ways: first, there will be separate essays by Nina Baym, Cecelia Tichi, and Elaine Showalter devoted directly to matters of gender and literary culture. Baym’s essay, “The Rise of the Woman Writer,” will take up the emergence of gothic and sentimental fiction in the nineteenth century and the importance of women novelists, essayists, and female readers in the ante-bellum period. At the same time, Carolyn Porter will treat some of the same women writers, such as Margaret Fuller, in her essay on non-fictional prose of the same time period. In the section of the book covering the late nineteenth century Tichi’s “Women Writers and the New Woman,” will study the cultural changes regarding gender that occurred in those decades. Here those features of the works of Chopin, Gilman, Cather, Wharton, Glasgow and others which are related to gender receive special treatment, whereas these same writers appear in Eric Sundquist’s essay on “Realism and Regionalism” in a different context. Simliar, Showalter’s “The Other Lost Generation: Women Writers between the Wars” ensures that readers of the History will understand the dilemma of women writers in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of her novelists, like Tess Slesinger, may appear in Wendy Steiner’s examination of fiction of these decades while some women poets in Showalter’s essay may surface again in Cary Nelson’s general essay on poetry. Gertrude Stein will receive detailed treatment in Linda Wagner’s essay on “Stein, Hemingway and Fitzgerald,” but she will also appear in a number of other essays.
In addition, every contributor to the volume has been urged to give special attention in genre and period essays to women authors who were likely to have been slighted or ignored by past histories. Thus, writers like Fuller, Stowe, Chopin, Jewett, Freeman, and Stein will certainly appear in essays devoted to women entirely, and in essays about historical periods or genres in which women figure strongly. Indexing and cross-referencing will be key elements of this work.
In contract to the LHUS which had only one woman contributor among its sixty, the present project includes sixteen female