Overview
- Contributes to scholarship on American women writers
- Interrogates representations of women in literature and culture in the nineteenth century
- Examines Harriet Beecher Stowe’s role in undermining accepted female archetypes
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (PLSM)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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.
Reviews
“Provocative and persuasive, Women in Medicine introduces us to the nineteenth century’s poisonous woman who becomes either her polar opposite, the heroic doctor, or the newly pathologized vampire. Ranging from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Cassy to Theda Bara’s film vamp, Sara Crosby’s portrayal of this quintessential figure is as much a page turner as the popular texts Sara Crosby interrogates. ” (Mary Kelley, Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan, USA)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
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).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Book Subtitle: From Poisoners to Doctors, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Theda Bara
Authors: Sara L. Crosby
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96463-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-96462-1Published: 01 October 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-07197-4Published: 21 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-96463-8Published: 14 September 2018
Series ISSN: 2634-6435
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6443
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 257
Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literary Theory, History of Science