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Archives of Labor: Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States
Lori Merish
€ 156.72
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Description for Archives of Labor: Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States
Hardback. Num Pages: 328 pages, 7 illustrations. BIC Classification: 1KBB; 3JH; DSK; HBJK; HBLL; JFSJ1. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). .
In Archives of Labor Lori Merish establishes working-class women as significant actors within literary culture, dramatically redrawing the map of nineteenth-century US literary and cultural history. Delving into previously unexplored archives of working-class women's literature—from autobiographies, pamphlet novels, and theatrical melodrama to seduction tales and labor periodicals—Merish recovers working-class women's vital presence as writers and readers in the antebellum era. Her reading of texts by a diverse collection of factory workers, seamstresses, domestic workers, and prostitutes boldly challenges the purportedly masculine character of class dissent during this era. Whether addressing portrayals of white New England "factory girls," fictional accounts of African American domestic workers, or the first-person narratives of Mexican women working in the missions of Mexican California, Merish unsettles the traditional association of whiteness with the working class to document forms of cross-racial class identification and solidarity. In so doing, she restores the tradition of working women's class protest and dissent, shows how race and gender are central to class identity, and traces the ways working women understood themselves and were understood as workers and class subjects.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2017
Publisher
Duke University Press United States
Number of pages
328
Condition
New
Number of Pages
328
Place of Publication
North Carolina, United States
ISBN
9780822362999
SKU
V9780822362999
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-50
About Lori Merish
Lori Merish is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University and the author of Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature, also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews for Archives of Labor: Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States
"[Archives of Labor] is a remarkable feat of original research and suggests routes for further study – not least on formal innovation and tone in antebellum literature."
Stephanie Kelley
TLS
"In the depth and range of her arguments, as well as in the important questions about methodology that her work implicitly raises, Merish opens up new debates and issues for feminist working-class recovery projects in the antebellum period and beyond it. . . . Future scholars and activists can build on Merish’s imaginative and resourceful study."
Francesca Sawaya
American Literary History
“Archives of Labor is a marvel of archival recovery. Exploring many previously unknown and understudied texts, Merish focused not just on novels and poetry, but also on radical labor periodicals, pamphlet novels, periodical literature, theatrical melodrama, the testimonios of Mexican mission workers, and other literary ephemera. . . . An important interdisciplinary contribution to feminist history and literary scholarship.”
Ana Stevenson
Australasian Journal of American Studies
"Powerful, groundbreaking. . . . Archives of Labor makes an important and decisive contribution to the vocabulary of class in American literary studies."
Andrew Lawson
Legacy
"Exciting . . . Lori Merish has written a book about how feminists, scholars, and workers can commemorate their own struggles for emancipation by giving gendered particularity to memory itself."
Bill V. Mullen
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
"Lori Merish’s Archives of Labor offers a nuanced and thoroughly researched analysis of antebellum American working-class women’s engagement with literary culture. . . . Archives of Labor is a remarkable book that merits the close attention of historians and literary scholars alike, both for its argument and its methods."
Susan M. Ryan
Journal of the Early Republic
"The book’s broad literary scope is one of its truly great pleasures. . . . Merish anchors her brilliant analyses of these works in the often paradoxical, critical challenges which these women leveled against the 'romance' of labor, the 'moralization' and sentimental eroticizing of 'virtuous' seamstresses, and the middleclass privatizing of sympathy and domesticity."
Xiomara Santamarina
Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Stephanie Kelley
TLS
"In the depth and range of her arguments, as well as in the important questions about methodology that her work implicitly raises, Merish opens up new debates and issues for feminist working-class recovery projects in the antebellum period and beyond it. . . . Future scholars and activists can build on Merish’s imaginative and resourceful study."
Francesca Sawaya
American Literary History
“Archives of Labor is a marvel of archival recovery. Exploring many previously unknown and understudied texts, Merish focused not just on novels and poetry, but also on radical labor periodicals, pamphlet novels, periodical literature, theatrical melodrama, the testimonios of Mexican mission workers, and other literary ephemera. . . . An important interdisciplinary contribution to feminist history and literary scholarship.”
Ana Stevenson
Australasian Journal of American Studies
"Powerful, groundbreaking. . . . Archives of Labor makes an important and decisive contribution to the vocabulary of class in American literary studies."
Andrew Lawson
Legacy
"Exciting . . . Lori Merish has written a book about how feminists, scholars, and workers can commemorate their own struggles for emancipation by giving gendered particularity to memory itself."
Bill V. Mullen
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
"Lori Merish’s Archives of Labor offers a nuanced and thoroughly researched analysis of antebellum American working-class women’s engagement with literary culture. . . . Archives of Labor is a remarkable book that merits the close attention of historians and literary scholars alike, both for its argument and its methods."
Susan M. Ryan
Journal of the Early Republic
"The book’s broad literary scope is one of its truly great pleasures. . . . Merish anchors her brilliant analyses of these works in the often paradoxical, critical challenges which these women leveled against the 'romance' of labor, the 'moralization' and sentimental eroticizing of 'virtuous' seamstresses, and the middleclass privatizing of sympathy and domesticity."
Xiomara Santamarina
Nineteenth-Century Contexts