Recently added articles from ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly):
ATQ (1969-2008): Introduction.
Dec 01, 2008; ... ATQ editor Josie P. Campbell modestly credits the late Tom H. Towers, who preceded her as editor, for turning the ATQ into an excellent academic journal. She describes him as her "mentor in American Studies and popular culture studies and one of the smartest men, as well as one of the ...
"No time for repinings": Ruth McEnery Stuart reconstructs the South.
Dec 01, 2008; ... Louisiana native Ruth McEnery Stuart, a southern humorist and storyteller who moved to New York in the late nineteenth century, created a career that rivaled Mark Twain's. Like Twain, Stuart filled lecture halls on her speaking tours; she shared with him the ability to captivate audiences, ...
Money, mobility, and the idle speculation of Nathaniel Parker Willis.
Dec 01, 2008; ... Writing to his friend George Pumpelly in 1828, the budding literary celebrity Nathaniel Parker Willis boasted of the shoddy poems he had just published. They were, he claimed: <Pre>the nonsense of a 5 dollar inspiration ... the most reckless rhymesin the world--not one of ...
Domestic conspiracy: class conflict and performance in Louisa May Alcott's "Behind a Mask".
Dec 01, 2008; ... Although it is now recognized that class conflict reaches into all spheres--not only politics and labor, but also family and private life--until recently scholars of nineteenth-century America have tended to reinforce the sentimental fiction of separate spheres, understanding the middle- ...
Unsexed by labor: middle-class women and the need to work.
Dec 01, 2008; ... In the post-Civil War struggle in the United States to regain economic stability it was not uncommon for single, middle-class women to leave home and seek employment either out of necessity or, increasingly, out of a desire to develop a professional career. Whether needing money or ...
Class and conflict in the United States.
Sep 01, 2008; ... Introduction Since the arrival of the earliest European settlers fleeing rigid class systems in Europe, our national myth claims this country as a classless society, yet social stratification has always been a powerful force in American life. Though this stratification is denied ...
Drowning the Irish: natural borders and class boundaries in Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod.(Critical essay)(Essay)
Sep 01, 2008; ... For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the State into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. (Thoreau, ...
Class struggle in the parlor: an archaeological perspective on Minneapolis Irish-American workers.(Critical essay)
Sep 01, 2008; ... In late nineteenth-century Minneapolis Irish members of the "working class" exhibited socially meaningful values and behaviors that can be considered "middle class," especially in their totality and in comparison to other data. Working class in the sense used here refers to people who made ...
The code duello and the reified self in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson.(Critical essay)
Sep 01, 2008; ... In Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, the code duello--sustained by the traditions of southern gentility and honor--has the power to trump laws, religious creeds, and moral principles. Placed highest among steps to social status, the code is a dominating cultural force in the antebellum ...
Double-voicedness in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: "loud talking" to a northern black readership.(Critical essay)
Sep 01, 2008; ... Man is following the evil devices of his own heart--for he is not willing even to acknowledge us made in Gods own Image--have not the decision of the last few days--in Washington--decided this for us--I see nothing for the Black Man--to look forward toy--but to forget his old Motto--and ...
Sounding Walden Pond: the depths and "double shadows" of Thoreau's autobiographical symbol.(Henry David Thoreau)(Critical essay)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Symbolically, the pond remains bottomless. (Schneider 102) Autobiography is that form of narrative that takes up most explicitly the problematic of depth. (Gunn 198) If, to adopt Henry David Thoreau's own directives for effective reading, "we must laboriously seek the ...
Lydia Sigourney's "To a Shred of Linen": lineaments of the domestic and the sublime.(Critical essay)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Although there are surprisingly few critical inquiries published on Lydia Sigourney (perhaps the most popular woman writing poetry in mid-nineteenth-century America, and the author of over fifty volumes of prose and verse), those who have addressed her work seem to agree that she was ...
Plots and counterplots: the defense of sensational fiction in Louisa May Alcott's "Behind a Mask".(Critical essay)
Jun 01, 2008; ... Louisa May Alcott is now well known for having led a sensationally double literary life: the author of the demure Little Women was also the author--anonymously and pseudonymously--of such thrillers as "AMarble Woman; or, The Mysterious Model," "V.V.: or, Plots and Counterplots," and ...
Thirty years a slave, and four years a fairy Godmother: dressmaking as self-making in Elizabeth Keckley's autobiography.
Mar 01, 2008; ... My clothes may express the dressmaker, but they don't express me.--Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (183) In this epigraph from Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer argues with Madame Merle about whether or not clothing expresses the wearer. Isabel's retort is ...
Harriot F. Curtis: worker, author, editor.
Mar 01, 2008; ... Harriot F. Curtis (1813-89) may be familiar to some readers as an editor of the factory women's periodical, the Lowell Offering, published in Lowell, Massachusetts, from 1840 to 1845, to which she also contributed much fiction and nonfiction. This essay examines her editorial work and ...
Capital sentiment: Fanny Fern's transformation of the gentleman publisher's code.
Mar 01, 2008; ... Fanny Fern's meteoric rise to fame occurred during a crucial stage in the development of capitalism in America. The changing market conditions that met with seismic ideological shifts regarding work and gender are at the heart of Fern's writing. Fern capitalized on the sudden rise in ...
Campaigning for the literary marketplace: Nathaniel Hawthorne, David Bartlett, and the Life of Franklin Pierce.
Mar 01, 2008; ... Since the 1824 presidential race, campaign biographies have constituted a distinct genre of American biographical literature. Awakened by the emerging power of a mass electorate, presidential candidates sought innovative strategies for delivering themselves and their political platforms to ...
John Burroughs and the nineteenth century.(Report)
Dec 01, 2007 ... Introduction This is the second of a two-part special issue of ATQ on John Burroughs and the nineteenth century. My fuller introduction is found in the September 2007 issue, along with articles by John Tallmadge, on rediscovering Burroughs's themes, form, and style, as distinct ...
John Burroughs and the scientific imagination.(Report)
Dec 01, 2007; ... Writing in Time and Change (1912), John Burroughs expresses his growing sense of wonder at the world as seen through the eyes of the geologist, the miracle of life as seen against "a background of a vast aeon of geologic and astronomic time, out of which the forces that shaped it have ...
Alienation or intimacy?: the roles of science in the cultural narratives of Gifford Pinchot and John Burroughs.(Report)
Dec 01, 2007; ... America is still at heart, a business-oriented society .... We are still naively sure science and technique will heal the wounds and sores we leave on the earth, when in fact those wounds are more malignant than ever. Perhaps we will never be at perfect peace with the natural order of this ...