A Wound of One's Own: Louisa May Alcott's Civil War Fiction

Young, Elizabeth

doi:10.1353/aq.1996.0023

Cited by 15 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 33 publications

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“…Nelson asserts that “Civil War-era texts habitually register this cultural pressure to conform to an ideal, gendered literacy, a phenomenon indicative of the complex interaction of gender coding and the deployment and negotiation of power”22 (p. 44). This view is qualified, if not contradicted, however, by Elizabeth Young who contends that from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Margaret Mitchell, “novels frame the literary genealogy of the Civil War so powerfully as to dominate popular, if not scholarly, understanding of the war…the Civil War novel was feminised from the start by the figure of the female author”23 (pp. 439–474).…”

Section: Gendered Pagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gendered spaces, gendered pages: Union women in Civil War nurse narratives

Telford

Long

2012

Med Humanities

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This interdisciplinary analysis joins literary and culture studies with history using Daphne Spain's theory of gendered spaces. Specifically, we examine the reconfiguration of the spaces of military medical work and of book publishing that produced popular literary representations of those medical spaces. As a social historian of nursing and a scholar of American literature and culture, we argue that the examination of Civil War narratives by or about Northern female nurses surveys a landscape in which women penetrated the masculine spaces of the military hospital and the literary spaces of the wartime narrative. In so doing, these women transformed these spaces into places acknowledging and even relying upon what had been traditionally considered male domains. Like many historiographical papers written about nurses and the impact of their practice over time, this work is relevant to those practicing nursing today, specifically those issues related to professional authority and professional autonomy.

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Section: Gendered Pagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gendered spaces, gendered pages: Union women in Civil War nurse narratives

Telford

Long

2012

Med Humanities

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Revisioning Death and Dying: 19th-Century Attitudes as Reflected in Louisa May Alcott's Antebellum and Civil War Writings

Talley¹

2005

Prosp.

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In “The Pornography of Death,” an essay originally published in 1955 and later incorporated into a book-length study, anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer was the first to document a dramatic shift between Victorian and contemporary attitudes toward sexuality and death. Victorian society viewed death as a natural, integral part of life, while sexuality was considered obscene and pornographic, a topic unfit for polite conversation and social discourse. In the 20th century, however, Gorer locates an “unremarked shift in prudery; whereas copulation has become more and more ‘mentionable,’ particularly in the Anglo-Saxon societies, death has become more and more ‘unmentionable’ as a natural process” (195). Responding to Gorer's provocative argument, other scholars have confirmed this cultural shift from acceptance to fear and denial of death, and as popular interest in this phenomenon has developed in the United States, a credible canon of study has formed to fill the previous void in scholarship regarding the historical, psychological, and cultural dimensions of death that simultaneously fascinate and silence Americans. As a result, death in recent decades has become an acceptable field of scholarly inquiry. However, although often viscerally aroused by abstract death and irresistibly drawn to its depiction, Americans as a society remain uncomfortable with death's immediate implications and, in many contexts, avoid contemplating its relationship to their own lives and the lives of those around them.In contrast, as Charles O. Jackson observes, “The popular mind of antebellum America was saturated with open concern about death,” a concern prompted not only “by ‘actuarial prevalence’ but by ‘existential proximity’ Life expectancy throughout the century remained limited, measured against today's standards, approximately forty years in 1850 and forty-seven at the close of the century” (61).

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Sibling Pedagogy: The Brother-Sister Ideal in Domestic Advice and Children’s Periodical Literature

VanDette¹

2013

Sibling Romance in American Fiction, 1835–1900

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A Wound of One's Own: Louisa May Alcott's Civil War Fiction

Cited by 15 publications

References 33 publications

Gendered spaces, gendered pages: Union women in Civil War nurse narratives

Gendered spaces, gendered pages: Union women in Civil War nurse narratives

Revisioning Death and Dying: 19th-Century Attitudes as Reflected in Louisa May Alcott's Antebellum and Civil War Writings

Sibling Pedagogy: The Brother-Sister Ideal in Domestic Advice and Children’s Periodical Literature

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