The Artistry of Anger
Black and White Women's Literature in America, 1820-1860
By Linda M. Grasso
264 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, notes, bibl., index
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Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-5348-1
Published: March 2002 -
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8078-6019-9
Published: April 2003
Gender and American Culture
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Awards & distinctions
Finalist for the 2003 First Book Prize, Modern Language Association
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.
About the Author
Linda M. Grasso is professor of English at York College, the City University of New York.
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Reviews
"Grasso writes beautifully, with clarity and grace. Her argument that anger operates as a driving force in the work of both white and black women writers provides an astonishingly simple, accurate, and useful paradigm for readers and scholars trying to understand the pre-Civil War period in American women's writing. Her deeply thoughtful, historically grounded, central idea--along with her penetrating applications of that idea to the work of Child, Stewart, Fern, and Wilson--make this a study that will be widely read and relied upon."--Elizabeth Ammons, Tufts University