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Female Physicians in American Literature traces the woman physician character throughout her varying depictions in 19th-century literature, from her appearance in sensational fiction as an evil abortionist to her more well-known idyllic, feminine presence in novels of realism and regionalism. "Murderess," "hag," "She-Devil," "the instrument of the very vilest crime known in the annals of hell"—these are just a few descriptions of women abortionists in popular 19th-century sensational fiction. In novels of regionalism, however, she is often depicted as moral, feminine, and self-sacrificing. This dichotomy, Jessee argues, reveals two opposing literary approaches to registering the national fears of all that both women and abortion evoke: the terrifying threats to white, masculine, Anglo-American male supremacy.
This early feminist novel is a wickedly funny slice of mid-nineteenth-century Americana peppered with details of the era's freakish medical tactics and leavened with a smart and sassy commentary about the societal restraints on women's physical and intellectual abilities. First published in 1852, Delia's Doctors is one of four known novels by Hannah Gardner Creamer, an American writer whose life and career have been all but absent from the annals of American history. In the book, eighteen-year-old Delia Thornton is ill. Her condition, more psychological than physical, worsens during the bitter winter, even as doctor after doctor attempts to cure her. As Delia typifies the female heroine whose sickness is aggravated by listlessness and inactivity, her brother's financee Adelaide Wilmot, is Delia's more robust counterpart. Adelaide thinks she could do anything, if only she were a man, and she dreams of being a physician. Quick to point out the shortcomings of male doctors in treating female illnesses, Adelaide saves Delia and delivers a series of arguments against New England patriarchy. Nina Baym's introduction provides historical context and discusses the book's feminist perspectives.
This book investigates how popular American literature and film transformed the poisonous woman from a misogynist figure used to exclude women and minorities from political power into a feminist hero used to justify the expansion of their public roles. Sara Crosby locates the origins of this metamorphosis in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Harriet Beecher Stowe applied an alternative medical discourse to revise the poisonous Cassy into a doctor. The newly “medicalized” poisoner then served as a focal point for two competing narratives that envisioned the American nation as a multi-racial, egalitarian democracy or as a white and male supremacist ethno-state. Crosby tracks this battle from the heroic healers created by Stowe, Mary Webb, Oscar Micheaux, and Louisia May Alcott to the even more monstrous poisoners or “vampires” imagined by E. D. E. N. Southworth, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theda Bara, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and D. W. Griffith.
Dick met the gaze of a pair of frank dark eyes, which were scanning his face with a look of friendly interest, and his thoughts flew back to the time which had elapsed between his leaving Sandhurst and obtaining his appointment to the Indian Staff Corps years ago. He had spent some months at home, to the great disgust of his uncle, the general, who vowed that this spell of idleness would ruin him for life, but he did nothing worse than fall in love with his sister's greatest friend. (source: text)
Cora is newly-wed, the wife of the handsome Doctor Frank. The couple goes for their first visit to Frank's family comprising his mother and his sister Emily. But Cora is stunned to discover that Frank's family are even more successful than what she had imagined. And Frank is the well-loved son in the family and she sets off to prove to them her worth as his doting wife. The book is written in form of a journal with Cora narrating the events to her own mother.
Intended as a text for undergraduate students of English for their course on Women’s Writings in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, this compact and well-organized book provides both the history of the development of the short story in America and Britain and a comprehensive introduction to the modes on critical practices based on feminist thinking. It takes into account the strategies used by women writers, and discusses the politics of reception and production keeping especially the gender issue in mind. The text is divided into three parts—Part I: Introduction—containing two chapters that deal with the development of the American short story and the resurgence of radical feminism in America. These provide the historical and the feminist frame within which the short stories by the Anglo American Women’s Writers should be read. Part II gives four short stories: Kate Chopin—The Story of An Hour; Charlotte Perkins Gilman—The Yellow Wallpaper; Willa Cather—Coming, Aphrodite!; and Katherine Mansfield—Bliss. Each short story is preceded by a critical introduction, detailed references for further reading, and a biographical time line. Part III comprises three critical essays which provide sharp insights into the period in which the four women writers were writing. This book will be treasured not only by students but also by those who wish to study critically the feminist writings of the period. In addition, it will enrich readers’ understanding of American and British literary history and culture. The critical introduction to each short story traces the development of the form from its origins, both historically and in terms of female literary contributions to its development. The chapter on Radical Feminism is mapped in the context of social, political and cultural development. The book provides historical, literary and biographical contexts of the writers and their short stories.
The female performer with a public voice constitutes a remarkably vibrant theme in British and American narratives of the long nineteenth century. The tension between fictional female performers and other textual voices can be seen to refigure the cultural debate over the ‘voice’ of women in aesthetically complex ways. By focusing on singers, actresses, preachers and speakers, this book traces and explores an important tradition of feminine articulation. Drawing on critical approaches in literary studies, gender studies and philosophy, the book conceptualizes voice for the discussion of narrative texts. Examining voice both as a thematic concern and as an aesthetic effect, the individual chapters analyse how the actual articulation by female performers correlates with their cultural visibility and agency. What this study foregrounds is how women characters succeed in making themselves heard even if their voices are silenced in the end.
Women physicians in nineteenth-century America faced a unique challenge in gaining acceptance to the medical field as it began its transformation into a professional institution. The profession had begun to increasingly insist on masculine traits as signs of competency. Not only were these traits inaccessible to women according to nineteenth-century gender ideology, but showing competence as a medical professional was not enough. Whether women could or should be physicians hinged mostly on maintaining their femininity while displaying the newly established standard traits of successful practitioners of medicine. Women Physicians and Professional Ethos provides a unique example of how women influenced both popular and medical discourse. This volume is especially notable because it considers the work of African American and American Indian women professionals. Drawing on a range of books, articles, and speeches, Carolyn Skinner analyzes the rhetorical practices of nineteenth-century American women physicians. She redefines ethos in a way that reflects the persuasive efforts of women who claimed the authority and expertise of the physician with great difficulty. Descriptions of ethos have traditionally been based on masculine communication and behavior, leaving women’s rhetorical situations largely unaccounted for. Skinner’s feminist model considers the constraints imposed by material resources and social position, the reciprocity between speaker and audience, the effect of one rhetor’s choices on the options available to others, the connections between ethos and genre, the potential for ethos to be developed and used collectively by similarly situated people, and the role ethos plays in promoting social change. Extending recent theorizations of ethos as a spatial, ecological, and potentially communal concept, Skinneridentifies nineteenth-century women physicians’ rhetorical strategies and outlines a feminist model of ethos that gives readers a more nuanced understanding of how this mode of persuasion operates for all speakers and writers.