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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Original Copy: Ekphrasis, Gender, and the National Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Original Copy: Ekphrasis, Gender, and the National Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Vogelius, Christa Holm

Paperback

Series: Becoming Modern: Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Literary Criticism

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1625348444
ISBN13: 9781625348449
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: Feb 18 2025
Pages: 232
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.72 Width: 6.10 Depth: 8.96
Language: English

When critics of poet Phillis Wheatley, the first African American to publish a collection of poetry, dismiss her work as derivative, they fail to see her writing as part of a new creative pantheon, sitting alongside other works that, like the popular copybooks in antebellum America, are structured as a conversation between artistic allies. Different kinds of copying in this period were distinctly feminized practices, such as artistic copying, pedagogical recitation, and literary imitation. Ekphrasis, the literary description of a work of visual art, reveals a particularly interesting form of copying, as the artwork in question becomes a kind of mediated space between author and reader; this practice, then, becomes the emblematic form of literature as collective production.

Original Copy frames ekphrasis and other forms of literary and visual copy-work as key concepts for understanding the discussions of nationalism, originality, and gender that dominated US literary circles during the first half of the nineteenth century. Christa Holm Vogelius focuses on four major writers of the period--Phillis Wheatley, Margaret Fuller, Sophia Hawthorne, and Henry Longfellow--to offer a narrative of a self-consciously feminine antebellum literary culture that was equally invested in literary nationality and convention. The explicitly feminized forms of the copy between and within media, she argues, became a productive means by which writers across a variety of genres interrogated the ill-defined but ubiquitous idea of an original American literature. Original Copy bridges three bodies of scholarship that have remained largely distinct--studies of literary nationalism and transnationalism, scholarship on gender in nineteenth century literary culture, and aesthetic and media theory--to argue for the significance of both imitation and intimate author-reader relations to the development of an American literature.

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