1st Edition

Saving the World Girlhood and Evangelicalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Edited By Allison Giffen, Robin Cadwallader Copyright 2018
244 Pages
by Routledge

244 Pages
by Routledge

244 Pages
by Routledge

This book makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of childhood studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture by drawing on the intersecting fields of girlhood, evangelicalism, and reform to investigate texts written in North America about girls, for girls, and by girls. Responding both to the intellectual excitement generated by the rise of girlhood studies, as well as to... Read more

Introduction Allison Giffen and Robin L. Cadwallader



Part I. Fictional Representations of Girls I: Coming of Age and Conversion



1. "Never was born" Again: Grace, Legibility, and the Rhetoric of Topsy’s Conversion in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) Allison Curseen



2. Opaque Bodies and Perpetual Girlhood in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) Laura J. Schrock



3. "You have failed in everything": The Intersection of Spiritual and Academic Education in Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore (1867) LuElla D’Amico



4. Queer Friendship in The Wide Wide World (1850) and Pollyanna (1913) Kristen Proehl



Pat II. Fictional Representations of Girls II: Reform and the Evangelical



5. "The things she had to say!": Listening to Deaf-Mute Catty in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871) Jaime Alves



6. Costly Sympathy: Evangelicalism and the Economics of Suffering in The Lamplighter (1854) Alison Tracy Hale



7. Dwarfism and the Evangelical: Little Mabel’s Call for Reform Rachel Cope



Part III. Girls in the Archive: Excavating Representations of Girls



8. Daughters of a Reading People: Representations of African American Girlhood and Female Literacy in the Christian Recorder Vanessa Steinroetter



9. Lessons for Girls in Sunday School Stories: Representations of the Missionary Woman in Nineteenth-Century Religious Periodicals for Children in Protestant Canada Patricia Kmiec



10. "A Peep at the Heart": The Spiritual Life of Girls in Nineteenth-Century Methodist Fictions James M. Van Wyck and Christopher Anderson



Part IV. In Her Own Words: The Voices of Girls



11. "Heart Talk": Chinese School Girls’ Letters to American Girls Karen Li Miller



12. Black G

Biography

Allison Giffen is Professor of English at Western Washington University, US.



Robin L. Cadwallader is Professor of English/Communications and Director of the Women's Studies Program at Saint Francis University of Pennsylvania, US.