Archives of Labor: Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States

Lori Merish

Published by Duke University Press 2017

Archives of Labor

Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States

Lori Merish

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373315

Overview
Contents

About this book

Lori Merish establishes working-class women as significant actors within nineteenth-century U.S. literary culture by analyzing previously unexplored archives of working-class women's literature, showing how white, African American, and Mexican American factory workers, seamstresses, domestic workers, and prostitutes understood themselves while forging class identity.

Author / Editor information

Lori Merish is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University and the author of Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

"[Archives of Labor] is a remarkable feat of original research and suggests routes for further study – not least on formal innovation and tone in antebellum literature."

-- Stephanie Kelley TLS

"In the depth and range of her arguments, as well as in the important questions about methodology that her work implicitly raises, Merish opens up new debates and issues for feminist working-class recovery projects in the antebellum period and beyond it. . . . Future scholars and activists can build on Merish’s imaginative and resourceful study."

-- Francesca Sawaya American Literary History

“Archives of Labor is a marvel of archival recovery. Exploring many previously unknown and understudied texts, Merish focused not just on novels and poetry, but also on radical labor periodicals, pamphlet novels, periodical literature, theatrical melodrama, the testimonios of Mexican mission workers, and other literary ephemera. . . . An important interdisciplinary contribution to feminist history and literary scholarship.”

-- Ana Stevenson Australasian Journal of American Studies

"Powerful, groundbreaking. . . . Archives of Labor makes an important and decisive contribution to the vocabulary of class in American literary studies."

-- Andrew Lawson Legacy

"Exciting . . . Lori Merish has written a book about how feminists, scholars, and workers can commemorate their own struggles for emancipation by giving gendered particularity to memory itself."

-- Bill V. Mullen Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

"Lori Merish’s Archives of Labor offers a nuanced and thoroughly researched analysis of antebellum American working-class women’s engagement with literary culture. . . . Archives of Labor is a remarkable book that merits the close attention of historians and literary scholars alike, both for its argument and its methods."

-- Susan M. Ryan Journal of the Early Republic

"The book’s broad literary scope is one of its truly great pleasures. . . . Merish anchors her brilliant analyses of these works in the often paradoxical, critical challenges which these women leveled against the 'romance' of labor, the 'moralization' and sentimental eroticizing of 'virtuous' seamstresses, and the middleclass privatizing of sympathy and domesticity."

-- Xiomara Santamarina Nineteenth-Century Contexts

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
One. Factory Fictions Lowell Mill Women and the Romance of Labor Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
Two. Factory Labor and Literary Aesthetics The Lowell Mill Girl, Popular Fiction, and the Proletarian Grotesque Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
Three. Narrating Female Dependency The Sentimental Seamstress and the Erotics of Labor Reform Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	113
Four. Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and the Labor of Race Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	153
Five. Hidden Hands E. D. E. N. Southworth and Working-Class Performance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	180
Six. Writing Mexicana Workers Race, Labor, and the Western “Frontier” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
Postscript. Looking for Antebellum Workingwomen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	247
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	303

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 328
Illustrations
- Other: 7 illustrations

eBook

Published: May 4, 2017
ISBN: 9780822373315