ENG BC3997: “A d–d mob of scribbling women”: Nineteenth-century American Women Writers

Professor Lisa Gordis
BC 3997x, sec. 6 Fall 2014
T 2:10-4 pm Sulzberger Annex 102

Office: Barnard Hall 408D
Office phone: 854-2114
Mailbox: Barnard Hall 417
[email protected]
Office hours
: Wednesday 2-3:30 by appointment.
To sign up for an appointment, click here.

In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne complained that American publishing was “wholly given over to a d–d mob of scribbling women,” and that he could not hope to compete with women writers for popularity or sales. Yet Hawthorne’s texts were canonized as American classics, while texts by nineteenth-century women writers were largely ignored by the academy until late in the twentieth century. This course considers a variety of texts by nineteenth-century American women, including novels, short fiction, poetry, and journalism. We’ll consider women’s writing and women’s reading through a variety of lenses, including domesticity and women’s sphere, political action and suffrage, the economics of writing and publishing, sentimentality and anger, and canon formation and literary merit.

This fall, most materials for this course will be housed on a course blog. To join the blog, go to http://edblogs.columbia.edu/englx3997-006-2014-3/ and login using your uni.

You may download a pdf of the course syllabus here.

Charlotte Temple repaired

Charlotte Temple, the Overbury Collection, Barnard College Library