Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

From Poisoners to Doctors, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Theda Bara
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-3-319-96462-1
Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 257 Seiten, HC runder Rücken kaschiert, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 473 g

Reihe: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

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.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Crosby, Sara L.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1. Introduction. Making the Medicinal Poisoner.- Chapter 2. A Quarrel of Poisons: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Homeopathic Poisoner.- Chapter 3. Playing Poison: Mary Webb’s Antidote to the Tom Shows.- Chapter 4. With Friends Like These: E. D. E. N. Southworth and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Pathological Poisoner.- Chapter 5. The Lady Doctor and the Vamp: How Louisa May Alcott, Theda Bara, and Thomas Dixon, Jr., Killed the Poisonous Woman.- Chapter 6. Conclusion and Coda. A Presidential Election, My Cousin Rachel, and the Lingering Effects of the Medicinal Poisoner.

Über Autor(innen)

Sara L. Crosby is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University at Marion, USA, and author of Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America (2016).