TY - BOOK ID - 2994102 TI - Reclaiming authorship : literary women in America, 1850-1900 PY - 2006 SN - 0812239423 9780812239423 1322512787 0812203895 PB - Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, DB - UniCat KW - Authoring (Authorship) KW - Authorship KW - Oeuvres -- Attribution KW - Paternité artistique KW - Paternité littéraire KW - Qualité d'auteur KW - Schrijverskwaliteit en auteurschap KW - Writing (Authorship) KW - American literature KW - Women and literature KW - Literature KW - English literature KW - Agrarians (Group of writers) KW - Women authors&delete& KW - History and criticism KW - History KW - Women authors KW - 19th century KW - United States KW - Cummins, Maria Susanna KW - Alcott, Louisa May KW - Criticism and interpretation KW - Hawthorne, Nathaniel KW - Keckley, Elizabeth KW - Woolson, Constance Fenimore KW - James, Henry KW - Authorship. KW - History and criticism. KW - Cultural Studies. KW - Literature. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:2994102 AB - There was, in the nineteenth century, a distinction made between "writers" and "authors," Susan S. Williams notes, the former defined as those who composed primarily from mere experience or observation rather than from the unique genius or imagination of the latter. If women were more often cast as writers than authors by the literary establishment, there also emerged in magazines, advice books, fictional accounts, and letters a specific model of female authorship, one that valorized "natural" feminine traits such as observation and emphasis on detail, while also representing the distance between amateur writing and professional authorship. Attending to biographical and cultural contexts and offering fresh readings of literary works, Reclaiming Authorship focuses on the complex ways writers such as Maria S. Cummins, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Abigail Dodge, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Constance Fenimore Woolson put this model of female authorship into practice. Williams shows how it sometimes intersected with prevailing notions of male authorship and sometimes diverged from them, and how it is often precisely those moments of divergence when authorship was reclaimed by women. The current trend to examine "women writers" rather than "authors" marks a full rotation of the circle, and "writers" can indeed be the more capacious term, embracing producers of everything from letters and diaries to published books. Yet certain nineteenth-century women made particular efforts to claim the title "author," Williams demonstrates, and we miss something of significance by ignoring their efforts. ER -