Papers by Stephanie Palmer
New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, 2023
A new volume with fresh perspectives on the work of American author Mary E. Wilkins Freeman with ... more A new volume with fresh perspectives on the work of American author Mary E. Wilkins Freeman with superb contributions from scholars around the world (edited by Stephanie Palmer, Myrto Drizou, and Cécile Roudeau)
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2023
Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2002
William Dean Howells was committed to determining what would inspire people from different econom... more William Dean Howells was committed to determining what would inspire people from different economic, political, and religious backgrounds to imagine each other as respected members of a human community. Scholars have debated whether his realist aesthetic was suited to do that. Some have argued that realism works to contain the lower classes, and others have argued that it portrays a heterogeneous society in which social problems can be solved through human negotiation between the middle classes and others. Scholars have not, however, addressed how Howells performs the necessary shift in his fiction from a space in which characters focus on their own interests to a space in which they seek to enact justice through negotiating with disparate people. This article identifies and names what enacts that necessary shift: the literary device of accident. In Howells's fiction chance meetings, feelings of accidental connection, and injuries during travel force his middle-class characters ...
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 2003
Journal of American Studies
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps is widely recognised as an important American feminist author with transa... more Elizabeth Stuart Phelps is widely recognised as an important American feminist author with transatlantic roots. This essay considers how British editors, reviewers, and readers responded to Phelps's fiction. She enjoyed a large British audience that was generated by the success of The Gates Ajar (1868) and strong enough to carry readers to her later, more politically demanding works, particularly Hedged In (1870) and The Silent Partner (1871). Editors in particular seemed shocked and fascinated by her feminist agitation. The chapter considers responses in spiritualist periodicals as well as feminist and conservative religious outlets. The results suggest that Phelps’s varied output about everything from heaven to manufacturing was received as one interconnected feminist corpus.
THE Journal, Jan 1, 1997
Abstract: A group of graduate-student instructors and English faculty at the University of Michig... more Abstract: A group of graduate-student instructors and English faculty at the University of Michigan discusses how computers were used to teach writing in their English composition courses. Collaborative evaluation and writing using e-mail and World Wide Web ...
Women's Writing, Apr 27, 2016
Most scholars associate the popular, prolific and respected writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–... more Most scholars associate the popular, prolific and respected writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911), who was one of the most important American women writers of her generation, with the mid nineteenth century. In contrast, this essay argues for the salience of her late novel Confessions of a Wife (1902) by situating it within New Woman, aesthetic and decadent writing. Although Phelps is occasionally treated as a New Woman writer, it is the political New Woman in The Story of Avis (1877) or The Silent Partner (1871) on which scholars have
focused. In this essay, the author reads the decadent New Woman interested in exploring sexual gratification and forbidden emotions in Confessions of a Wife. In this late novel, Phelps advances her critique of marriage and exploration of the divided self by engaging in aesthetic motifs such as an extravagant throwing of the voice, a welter of references from material culture and references to Oriental tales. Such aesthetic motifs enable Phelps to foreground the decentered nature of subjectivity and particularly the subjectivity of women who desire sexual gratification, loyal companionship and intellectual sustenance. Click the link above for the full text.
Between 1890 and 1894, Britons experienced a ‘craze’ for the American writer Mary Wilkins. Freema... more Between 1890 and 1894, Britons experienced a ‘craze’ for the American writer Mary Wilkins. Freeman scholars Brent Kendrick and Shirley Marchalonis have documented that Britons played a leading role in establishing Freeman’s reputation. Yet to date, scholars have not analyzed the English craze for Freeman in detail, and few associate Freeman with international fame. Nevertheless, Freeman had a complicated and interesting transatlantic literary career, one that extends her relevance beyond both the United States and Americanists. In this essay, I uncover new evidence of how British reviewers and readers read Freeman, especially in terms of her nonconformist characters’ religious dissent, neglected in Freeman scholarship since the 1970s, and I analyze this evidence in light of international literary politics.
Studies in Travel Writing, Feb 1, 2010
This article analyses the oppositional potential of narrated travail in Emily Katharine Bates’s A... more This article analyses the oppositional potential of narrated travail in Emily Katharine Bates’s A Year in the Great Republic (1887) and other obscure travel books about the United States, written by foreigners or citizens, by contrasting them to the dominant travel discourse of the era. Although contemporary travel scholars often treat travail as a timeless, stock ingredient of the genre, this analysis demonstrates that travail is constructed and changes significantly in ideological and poetic potential over time. At the height of the Gilded Age, most canonical travel writers downplayed their own suffering. Most official writing about tourism suppressed any mention of injury or inconvenience. In contrast, Bates and, in substantially differing ways, Lee Meriwether, Rose Pender, Albert Richardson and Olive Logan discussed traveller vulnerability vis-à-vis the fragility of the body, the contingency of the travel industry and the labour of workers in that industry. Of all these marginal writers, Bates is the most notable. The link provides full access.
Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books), Jan 1, 2009
This book (not paper) reassesses the cultural work of local color literature by tracing the meani... more This book (not paper) reassesses the cultural work of local color literature by tracing the meaning of the regional travel accident motif through local color texts by Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and others. With the motif, the genre performs a class critique of tourism, emphasizes the contingency of everyone’s regional belonging, and thematizes how modernity comes to the country as well as the city.
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Sep 1, 2002
Howells’ key devices for bringing about social cohesion are chance meetings, injuries during trav... more Howells’ key devices for bringing about social cohesion are chance meetings, injuries during travel, and feelings of accidental entanglement. These devices comprise Howells’ particular aesthetic of accident. In his novels, such unplanned occurrences serve the purpose of fostering cognitive and emotional connections between social groups. Importantly, the devices fail to foster long-lasting connections; the novels emphasize that social fragmentation cannot be combated with serendipitous meetings alone. And yet, the devices do foster conversations that might serve as the first step toward lasting social cohesion in the future. This particular use of accident was tied up in Howells’ generic program of literary realism.
Arizona Quarterly, Jan 1, 2003
Both Bret Harte's "Miggles" and Sarah Orne Jewett's "The Life of Nancy" bring about interactions ... more Both Bret Harte's "Miggles" and Sarah Orne Jewett's "The Life of Nancy" bring about interactions between local and tourist characters with the literary motif of weary and unexpectedly halted travellers; and, in both stories, the motif appears to be vaguely old fashioned. Despite the motif's outworn feel, it actually serves as shorthand for a local and translocal story of change. By using this motif, Harte and Jewett reflect on how the places where they became adults and began to write have changed because of the emergence of a full-scale tourist industry.
Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, Sep 1, 2002
Discusses the strengths and weaknesses of foregrounding conflicts in American culture around gend... more Discusses the strengths and weaknesses of foregrounding conflicts in American culture around gender, race, and class in the context of teaching American culture to Turkish students.
ENCLS newsletter by Stephanie Palmer
Books by Stephanie Palmer
Routledge, 2019
This book analyses British reviews of American women fiction writers, essayists and poets between... more This book analyses British reviews of American women fiction writers, essayists and poets between the periods of literary domesticity and modernism. The book demonstrates that a variety of American women writers were intelligently read in Britain during this era. British reviewers read American women as literary artists, as women and as Americans. While their notion of who counted as "women" was too limited by race and class, they eagerly read these writers for insight about how women around the world were entering debates on women’s place, the class struggle, religion, Indian policy, childrearing, and high society. In the process, by reading American women in varied ways, reviewers became hybrid and dissenting readers. The taste among British reviewers for American women’s books helped change the predominant direction that high culture flowed across the Atlantic from east-to-west to west-to-east. Britons working in London or far afield were deeply invested in the idea of "America." "America," their responses prove, is a transnational construct.
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Papers by Stephanie Palmer
focused. In this essay, the author reads the decadent New Woman interested in exploring sexual gratification and forbidden emotions in Confessions of a Wife. In this late novel, Phelps advances her critique of marriage and exploration of the divided self by engaging in aesthetic motifs such as an extravagant throwing of the voice, a welter of references from material culture and references to Oriental tales. Such aesthetic motifs enable Phelps to foreground the decentered nature of subjectivity and particularly the subjectivity of women who desire sexual gratification, loyal companionship and intellectual sustenance. Click the link above for the full text.
ENCLS newsletter by Stephanie Palmer
Books by Stephanie Palmer
focused. In this essay, the author reads the decadent New Woman interested in exploring sexual gratification and forbidden emotions in Confessions of a Wife. In this late novel, Phelps advances her critique of marriage and exploration of the divided self by engaging in aesthetic motifs such as an extravagant throwing of the voice, a welter of references from material culture and references to Oriental tales. Such aesthetic motifs enable Phelps to foreground the decentered nature of subjectivity and particularly the subjectivity of women who desire sexual gratification, loyal companionship and intellectual sustenance. Click the link above for the full text.