Sedgwick Society Newsletter - Recent Publications

Recent Publications

Sedgwick publications continue, and we look forward to many more. Highlights include the expanded version of Judith Fetterley's keynote speech, Rebecca Faery's forthcoming book, and several exciting new dissertations-congratulations to the new Ph.D. members! Excerpted below is Patricia Kalayjian's 1996 NWSA article "Revisioning America's (Literary) Past: Sedgwick's Hope Leslie," an important reminder of Sedgwick's complex role in helping
to shape American literature.

Rebecca Faery Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation. University of Oklahoma Press, forthcoming, spring 1999.

Judith Fetterley "'My Sister! My Sister!': The Rhetoric of Catharine
Sedgwick's Hope Leslie." American Literature, 70.3 (September 1998), 491-516.
Special Issue: "No More Separate Spheres!" Editor: Cathy N. Davidson.

Victoria Clements Dancing Discourses: Subject/Object Relations in 19th-Century Woman's Fiction. Ph.D. Diss., 1998. In her dissertation, Clements extends her introduction to the Oxford UP edition of A New-England Tale, addressing the novel's paratext and Crazy Bet as sites of the struggle for authority between subject and object (from a more theoretist standpoint than was appropriate to the trade edition).

Victoria Clements and Etsuko Taketani included Sedgwick in their entry on "Historical Fiction" for the Encyclopedia of New England Culture, forthcoming from the University of New Hampshire's Center for the Humanities and Yale UP. They include Sedgwick in their discussion of writers such as Child and Cooper who interrogated the Puritan treatment of the Native American, identifying both reformist and conservative trends in these texts.

Melissa Homestead Imperfect Title: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Copyright. Ph.D. Diss. 1998. Homestead argues that the supposed failure of copyright law in 19th-century America actually enabled the development of female professional authorship and contributed to the dominance of women in the market. In their postures of authorial self-effacement and in their professed dedication to serving their readers, women authors such as Sedgwick, Stowe, Fern, and Jewett worked within the constraints of a policy which privileged readers' access to literature over authors' claimed property rights.

Karen Woods One Nation, One Blood: Miscegenation in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820-70. Ph.D. Diss. June, 1999. Sedgwick is one of Woods's featured novelists.

Patricia Kalayjian "Catharine Maria Sedgwick." Dictionary of Literary Biography, 1999.

Call for contributions to the Sedgwick Society Newsletter
If you have or would like to propose an article for the newsletter, please feel invited to contribute. The article should be 8 pages or less, that is, under 2000 words (counting notes and works cited).

Please e-mail me with your ideas and queries: lucinda.damonbach@salemstate.edu
Thank you in advance!

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