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American women played in important part in Protestant foreign missionary work from its early days at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This work allowed them to disseminate the Prostestant religious principles in which they believed, and by enabling them to acquire professional competence as ...

American women played in important part in Protestant foreign missionary work from its early days at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This work allowed them to disseminate the Prostestant religious principles in which they believed, and by enabling them to acquire professional competence as teachers, to break into public life and create new opportunities for themselves and other women. No institution was more closely associated with women missionaries than Mount Holyoke College. In this book, Amanda Porterfield examines Mount Holyoke founder Mary Lyon and the missionary women she trained. Her students assembled in a number of particular mission fields, most importantly Persia, India, Ceylon, Hawaii, and Africa. Porterfield focuses on three sites where documentation about their activities is especially rich-- northwest Persia, Maharashtra in western India, and Natal in southeast Africa. All three of these sites figured importantly in antebellum missionary strategy; missionaries envisioned their converts launching the conquest of Islam from Persia, overturning "Satan's seat" in India, and drawing the African descendants of Ham into the fold of Christendom. Porterfield shows that although their primary goal of converting large numbers of women to Protestant Christianity remained elusive, antebellum missionary women promoted female literacy everywhere they went, along with belief in the superiority and scientific validity of Protestant orthodoxy, the necessity of monogamy and the importance of marital affection, and concern for the well-being of children and women. In this way, the missionary women contributed to cultural change in many parts of the world, and to the development of new cultures that combined missionary concepts with traditional ideals.

In this compelling interdisciplinary study, Linda Grasso demonstrates that using anger as a mode of analysis and the basis of an aesthetic transforms our understanding of American women's literary history. Exploring how black and white nineteenth-century women writers defined, expressed, and ...

In this compelling interdisciplinary study, Linda Grasso demonstrates that using anger as a mode of analysis and the basis of an aesthetic transforms our understanding of American women's literary history. Exploring how black and white nineteenth-century women writers defined, expressed, and dramatized anger, Grasso reconceptualizes antebellum women's writing and illuminates an unrecognized tradition of discontent in American literature. She maintains that two equally powerful forces shaped this tradition: women's anger at their exclusion from the democratic promise of America, and the cultural prohibition against its public articulation.

Grasso challenges the common notion that nineteenth-century women's writing is confined to domestic themes and shows instead how women channeled their anger into art that addresses complex political issues such as slavery, nation-building, gender arrangements, and race relations. Cutting across racial and genre boundaries, she considers works by Lydia Maria Child, Maria,W. Stewart, Fanny Fern, and Harriet Wilson as superb examples of the artistry of angry expression. Transforming their anger through literary imagination, these writers bequeathed their vision of an alternative America both to their contemporaries and to subsequent generations.

During the 1992 Democratic Convention and again while delivering Harvard University's commencement address two years later, Vice President Al Gore shared with his audience a story that showed the effect of sentiment in his life. In telling how an accident involving his son had provided him with a ...

During the 1992 Democratic Convention and again while delivering Harvard University's commencement address two years later, Vice President Al Gore shared with his audience a story that showed the effect of sentiment in his life. In telling how an accident involving his son had provided him with a revelation concerning the compassion of others, Gore effectively reconstructed himself as a typical, middle-class American for whom sympathy can lead to salvation. This contemporary reiteration of mid-nineteenth-century American sentimental discourse proves to be a fruitful point of departure for Mary Louise Kete's argument that sentimentality has been an important and recurring form of cultural narrative that has helped to shape middle-class American life.

Many scholars have written about the sentimental novel as a primarily female genre and have stressed its negative ideological aspects. Kete finds that in fact many men -- from writers to politicians -- participated in nineteenth-century sentimental culture. Importantly, she also recovers the utopian dimension of the phenomenon, arguing that literary sentimentality, specifically in the form of poetry, is the written trace of a broad cultural discourse that Kete calls "sentimental collaboration" -- an exchange of sympathy that establishes common cultural or intellectual ground. Kete reads the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney with an eye toward the deployment of sentimentality for the creation ot Americanism, as well as for political and abolitionist ends. Finally, she locates the origins of sentimental collaboration in the activities of ordinary people whoparticipated in mourning rituals -- writing poetry, condolence letters, or epitaphs -- to ease their, personal grief.

Sentimental Collaborations significantly advances prevailing scholarship on Romanticism, antebellum cul