Treacherous Texts: An Anthology of U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846-1946 - Softcover

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9780813553535: Treacherous Texts: An Anthology of U.S. Suffrage Literature, 1846-1946

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813553539 ISBN 13: 9780813553535

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2012

Treacherous Texts collects more than sixty literary texts written by smart, savvy writers who experimented with genre, aesthetics, humor, and sex appeal in an effort to persuade American readers to support woman suffrage. Although the suffrage campaign is often associated in popular memory with oratory, this anthology affirms that suffragists recognized early on that literature could also exert a power to move readers to imagine new roles for women in the public sphere.

Uncovering startling affinities between popular literature and propaganda, Treacherous Texts samples a rich, decades-long tradition of suffrage literature created by writers from diverse racial, class, and regional backgrounds. Beginning with sentimental fiction and polemic, progressing through modernist and middlebrow experiments, and concluding with post-ratification memoirs and tributes, this anthology showcases lost and neglected fiction, poetry, drama, literary journalism, and autobiography; it also samples innovative print cultural forms devised for the campaign, such as valentines, banners, and cartoons. Featured writers include canonical figures as well as writers popular in their day but, until now, lost to ours.

Includes writings by:
� Sojourner Truth
� Elizabeth Cady Stanton
� Frederick Douglass
� Fanny Fern
� Harriet Beecher Stowe
� Djuna Barnes
� Charlotte Perkins Gilman
� Marianne Moore
� Sui Sin Far
� Edna St. Vincent Millay
� Gertrude Stein
And many others.

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About the Author:

Mary Chapman is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of *Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and US Modernism* and the coeditor of Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture. Most recently, she published *Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton.* She gives frequent public lectures on suffrage and print cultural activism.

Angela Mills is a former assistant professor of English at Brock University.

Review:

"This exciting anthology has no competitors. With an impressive historical range and a great diversity of primary documents and useful reference materials, Treacherous Texts offers an original contribution to scholarship and an important classroom teaching tool." (Ann Ardis University of Delaware)

"Treacherous Texts highlights diversity and contestation within the U.S. suffrage movement by mining activists' innovative use of literature and print culture. This rich and varied collection addresses critical issues in the suffrage campaign in ways that will engage history and literature students and scholars alike." (Nancy A. Hewitt Rutgers University)

"Treacherous Texts is an invaluable resource, one that reminds twenty-first-century readers of the richness, complexity, innovation, and experimentation of the American suffrage movement and makes a strong argument for the continued study of this burgeoning field." (Legacy)

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