Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hamer, Molly

Titel

Authoring the Modern: Women Writers of Color in the Turn-of-the-Century American Press

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation draws attention to and interprets the publication of literary work by women writers of color in the mainstream American periodical press at the turn of the century. Scholarly accounts have typically described these authors in terms of their social marginalization and their texts in terms of their distance from or resistance to dominant literary and social conditions. This project, in contrast, demonstrates the publication success and popular media presence of several women authors of color and then explores how publishers and critics defined and positioned the appeal of these authors for a general, presumably-white readership, as well as how these authors negotiated the opportunities and constraints of these publication contexts in their writing. This dissertation seeks to provide a rich description of the rhetorical contexts in which these works were published; in addition to close readings of specific literary texts, this projects carefully examines archives of newspapers and periodicals to uncover new social and generic contexts for these publications. In focusing on popular texts written by women of color in this period, the autobiography or life story emerges as a particularly prevalent and successful genre, and this dissertation emphasizes the ways in which these authors’ life narratives engaged with turn-of-the-century discourses and fictions of female development, ultimately arguing that these autobiographies appealed to readers because they offered new and alternative visions of the course of a woman’s life story. This dissertation suggests that these authors functioned complexly in the popular press both as signifiers of the natural and even of the primitive and—paradoxically—as signifiers of the modern, fashionable, and vital. This project argues for the modernism of these authors, both in terms of their presence in popular culture and in terms of the content and formal qualities of their works. Considering how these women and their life stories (both fictional and non-fictional) represented modernity within popular media highlights the centrality of feminized and racialized notions of nature, style, mobility, and vitality to early-twentieth-century definitions of what constituted the modern in America.