Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels

Recovers the careers of four US women serial writers, and establishes a new archive for American literary studies.

Dale M. Bauer (Author)

9781108486545, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 December 2019

184 pages, 10 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.6 cm, 0.42 kg

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 M. 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.

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 women serial writers.

Subject Areas: Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]