Archives of Labor: Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States - Hardcover

Merish, Lori

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822362996 ISBN 13: 9780822362999

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Review:

"[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 Times Literary Supplement 2017-09-27)

"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 2018-02-22)

“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 2017-12-01)

"Powerful, groundbreaking. . . . Archives of Labor makes an important and decisive contribution to the vocabulary of class in American literary studies." (Andrew Lawson Legacy 2018-09-01)

"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 2018-09-01)

"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 2019-03-01)

"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 2018-10-03)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0822362996
• ISBN 13: 9780822362999
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328