Lexington Books
Pages: 230
Trim: 6¼ x 9½
978-1-66692-153-3 • Hardback • May 2023 • $100.00 • (£77.00)
978-1-66692-154-0 • eBook • May 2023 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Victoria Brehm is retired professor of American literature and helped found the Constance Fenimore Woolson Society.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. “The Lady of Little Fishing” (1874) and “Castle Nowhere” (1875): The Politics of Race and Money
Chapter 2. “Mission Endeavor” (1876): Jerusalem on Lake Superior
Chapter 3. “Mrs. Edward Pinckney” (1879): Interracial Marriage in the Post-Bellum South
Chapter 4. “A Florentine Experiment” (1880): J. P. Morgan and the Responsibilities of Wealth
Chapter 5. For the Major (1882): Lies, Secrets, Silence
Chapter 6. Horace Chase (1893): Gilded Age Sense and Sensibility
Chapter 7. “A Waitress” (1894): American Complacency at the Fin de Siècle
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the Author
Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Subversive Politics is the most recent of Victoria Brehm’s extensive contributions to the study of Great Lakes Literature and history. Brehm has authored articles and edited important anthologies – collections that rescue many nearly forgotten Great Lakes texts, making these works widely available to readers and scholars. In Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Subversive Politics, Brehm’s focus is on the works of Great Lakes author Constance Fenimore Woolson. One of the challenges of reading Woolson’s work is understanding the layering of references to issues, people, and concerns of post-Civil war America… While Woolson’s contemporaries could be expected to recognize many of the hints and clues woven into her texts, today’s readers may miss out on the richness of what Woolson’s texts reveal about 19th Century politics and culture. Essentially, Brehm decodes some Woolson’s texts for a new generation of readers, including Great Lake stories like “The Lady of Little Fishing,” “Castle Nowhere,” and “Mission Endeavor.” Even readers who may have studied Woolson’s texts before will find themselves eager to re-read with the new lens Brehm provides- a lens that reveals surprising similarities between the politically polarized postbellum America and America in our own time.
— Inland Seas