Writing from the antechamber: Prefaces and authorship in the works of Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James.
Item
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Title
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Writing from the antechamber: Prefaces and authorship in the works of Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James.
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Identifier
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AAI9820585
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identifier
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9820585
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Creator
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Vaux, M. Molly.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Neal Tolchin
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Literature, Modern
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Abstract
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This dissertation explores the work of three American writers who used the preface to speak to their audiences about writing and culture. In the prefaces to their novels and stories Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James demonstrate both a desire to represent the experience of writing and a need to shape that representation to the exigencies defined by their audiences. Their prefaces reveal, in a more direct way than their fiction, social and cultural pressures weighing on their writing, as well as strategies for both engaging and resisting those pressures. In this study I examine how these writers mediate with their audiences through their prefaces to win authority for themselves as authorial figures, to direct the reading of the works their prefaces put forward, and to demonstrate the social and cultural uses of their texts. The moment I have chosen to examine in each writer's career corresponds with a significant point in the growth of the American literary world. In my chapter on Lydia Maria Child's first novel, Hobomok, I examine Child's representation of herself in the preface through the mask of an established male editor at a time when the market for American novels--and for novels written by women--was on the verge of great expansion. In my chapter on Hawthorne's works I explore a range of his writing from the middle phase of his career, 1838 to 1851, during which the preface operates as a vehicle for Hawthorne's emergence just as publishers were strengthening their capacity to reach a national audience. In my chapter on James's prefaces to the New York Edition I study the ways in which the writing of The Golden Bowl and The American Scene were themselves essential prefatory acts to James's project of repackaging his works for an increasingly mercurial literary marketplace. From the chamber of the preface, I suggest, these writers demonstrate the ways in which the novel, together with its preface, provides models for self-constructing, for engaging with history, and for reconceiving community during a time of rapid change.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
