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A New-England Tale (Paperback, New)
Catharine Maria Sedgwick; Introduction by Susan K. Harris; Notes by Emily Van Dette
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R440
R387
Discovery Miles 3 870
Save R53 (12%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Jane Elton, orphaned as a young girl, goes to live with her aunt Mrs. Wilson, a selfish and overbearing woman who practices a repressive Calvinism. In their rural New England village, Jane grows up yearning to break free from Mrs. Wilson's tyranny and find her place as a citizen of the evolving American Republic. She is helped by her encounters with characters who embody various shadings of moral, religious, and civic virtue: the affectionate servant Mary Hull, a pious Methodist; Mr. Lloyd, a kind Quaker; Crazy Bet, emotional, sympathetic, but deeply unstable; and Old John, bereaved but wise. Ultimately, A New-England Tale is about the connection between parenting and governing, and the key role women play in shaping a fledgling nation.
When the U.S. liberated the Philippines from Spanish rule in 1898,
the exploit was hailed at home as a great moral victory, an
instance of Uncle Sam freeing an oppressed country from colonial
tyranny. The next move, however, was hotly contested: should the
U.S. annex the archipelago? The disputants did agree on one point:
that the United States was divinely appointed to bring
democracy--and with it, white Protestant culture--to the rest of
the world. They were, in the words of U.S. Senator Albert
Beveridge, "God's arbiters," a civilizing force with a righteous
role to play on the world stage.
Mining letters, speeches, textbooks, poems, political cartoons and
other sources, Susan K. Harris examines the role of religious
rhetoric and racial biases in the battle over annexation. She
offers a provocative reading both of the debates' religious
framework and of the evolution of Christian national identity
within the U.S. The book brings to life the personalities who
dominated the discussion, figures like the bellicose Beveridge and
the segregationist Senator Benjamin Tillman. It also features
voices from outside U.S. geopolitical boundaries that responded to
the Americans' venture into global imperialism: among them
England's "imperial" poet Rudyard Kipling, Nicaragua's
poet/diplomat Ruben Dario, and the Philippines' revolutionary
leaders Emilio Aguinaldo and Apolinario Mabini. At the center of
this dramatis personae stands Mark Twain, an influential partisan
who was, for many, the embodiment of America. Twain had supported
the initial intervention but quickly changed his mind, arguing that
the U.S. decision to annex the archipelago was a betrayal of the
very principles the U.S. claimed to promote.
Written with verve and animated by a wide range of archival
research, God's Arbiters reveals the roots of current debates over
textbook content, evangelical politics, and American
exceptionalism-shining light on our own times as it recreates the
culture surrounding America's global mission at the turn into the
twentieth century."
Passionate readers both, Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain courted
through books, spelling out their expectations through literary
references as they corresponded during their frequent separations.
Surprisingly, in the process Olivia Langdon reveals herself not as
a hypochondriacal hysteric, as many twentieth-century critics have
portrayed her, but as a thoughtful intellectual, widely read in
literature, history and modern science. Not so surprisingly, Samuel
Clemens reveals himself as a critic and a sceptic, lampooning
Langdon's physics lessons and her literary heroines. He also shows
himself as an astute strategist, carefully manipulating Langdon and
her parents. At the same time, Clemens's letters exhibit his own
conservatism about women's nature and women's roles, while
Langdon's show her carefully choosing from her culture's array of
possible role models.
This study proposes interpretive strategies for nineteenth-century
American women's novels. Harris contends that women in the
nineteenth century read subversively, 'processing texts according
to gender based imperatives'. Beginning with Susannah Rowson's
best-selling seduction novel Charlotte Temple (1791), and ending
with Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913), Harris scans white,
middle-class women's writing throughout the nineteenth century. In
the process she both explores reading behaviour and formulates a
literary history for mainstream nineteenth-century American women's
fiction. Through most of the twentieth century, women's novels of
the earlier period have been denigrated as conventional,
sentimental, and overwritten. Harris shows that these conditions
are actually narrative strategies, rooted in cultural imperatives
and, paradoxically, integral to the later development of women's
texts that call for women's independence. Working with actual
women's diaries and letters, Harris first shows what contemporary
women sought from the books they read. She then applies these
reading strategies to the most popular novels of the period,
proving that even the most apparently retrograde demonstrate their
heroines' abilities to create and control areas culturally defined
as male.
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