Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-70

by Nina Baym

Book Overview

This reissue of the pioneering and standard book on antebellum women's domestic novels contains a new introduction situating the book in the context of important recent developments in the study of women's writing. Nina Baym considers 130 novels by 48 women, focusing on the works of a dozen especially productive and successful writers.

Woman's Fiction is a major-work in nineteenth-century literature, reexamining changes in the literary...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 025206285X
• ISBN13: 9780252062858
• Release Date: February 1993
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Length: 360 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Pioneering and path-breaking study

Nina Baym's pioneering study paved the way for the recovery of nineteenth-century American women novelists, writers who were "disappeared" by literary critics in the first half of the twentieth century intent on creating a pantheon of American literature peopled only by male writers (with the exception of Emily Dickinson). Indeed, Nina Baym is one of the "founding mothers" of scholarship on nineteenth-century women writers. Along with scholars such as Judith Fetterley, Marjorie Pryse, Sharon Harris, Mary Kelley, Nancy Cott and others, she inspired invigorating, exciting scholarship in this "new field" more than twenty years ago. Many novels from the nineteenth century have been reprinted by Rutgers University PRess and Oxford University PRess as a result of Baym's efforts.WOMAN'S FICTION is a fascinating, compelling study not only of the kinds of novels women wrote but also of WHY women in the nineteenth century wrote. Baym chronicles these writers often complicated view about womanhood in nineteenth-century America. Indeed, she provides a more complex picture of AMerican literary history in the nineteenth-century, one that includes much more than THE SCARLET LETTER and MOBY-DICK. Although many other similar studies have been written since WOMAN'S FICTION was first published (studies that rightly challenge several of Baym's assertions), it is still a vital and important work in the study of American literature in general and nineteenth-century women writers in particular.And contrary to the other review, WOMAN'S FICTION is NOT rambling and incoherent, nor "a student nightmare." This former student was so inspired after reading WOMAN'S FICTION when she was an undergraduate, that she went on to get a Ph.D. in American literature, specializing in nineteenth-century American women writers, and became an Assistant Professor of English.WOMAN'S FICTION is a fascinating read for ANYONE interested in American women's writing.