Voices of the Nation
Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture

Studies the relationship between women's speech and nineteenth-century American literary culture.

Caroline Field Levander (Author)

9780521102520, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 March 2009

204 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.31 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Voices of the Nation carves out an important space in the evolution of a more complex, nuanced understanding of the role of women in shaping nineteenth-century American public life and identity.' American Literary Realism

Throughout the nineteenth century, American fiction displayed a fascination with women's speech - describing how women's voices sound, what happens when women speak and what reactions their speech produces, especially in their male listeners. Voices of the Nation argues that closer inspection of these recurring descriptions also performed political work that has had a profound - though unspecified to date - impact on American culture. Commentaries on the female voice were propounded by writers such as Henry James, William Dean Howells and Noah Webster, and these texts played a central role in attempts to define and enforce the radical social changes instituted by the emerging bourgeoisie.

Introduction
The Voice of the Nation: Gender, Speech, and Nineteenth-Century American life
1. Bawdy talk: The Politics of Women's Speech in Henry James's The Bostonians and Sarah J. Hale's The Lecturess
2. 'Foul Mouthed Women': Disembodiment and Public Discourse in Herman Melville's Pierre and E.D.E.N. Southworth's The Fatal Marriage
3. Incarnate Words: Nativism, Nationalism, and the Female Body in Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures
4. Partners in Speech: Reforming Labor, Class, and the Working Woman's Body in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner
5. 'Queer Trimmings': Dressing, Cross-Dressing, and Women's Suffrage in Lillie Deereux Blake's Fettered for Life
6. Southern Oratory and The Slavery Debate in Caroline Lee Hentz's Planter's Northern Bride and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Conclusion
'Every Wrong that Needs a Voice': Women and Political Activism at the Turn into the Twentieth Century.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]