Studies in Fiction: Rethinking the American Masterpiece

Study Materials

RESOURCES	DESCRIPTIONS AND CONTEXT
General
MIT Online Writing and Communication Center	Information on MLA form for citation and the MIT style manual.
The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing	Information and writing and citations.
Oxford English Dictionary	Available online for MIT community and at many libraries
Searchable Bible	Preferred Search: in the “using:” drop-down menu, select “Standard Translations: King James Version”
Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms	From Jack Lynch, Rutgers University: How you can tell an iamb from a dactyl!
Making of America	Nineteenth-century American books and periodicals from Cornell University’s contribution to Making of America (MOA), a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.
MLA citations	From the University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center
Mary Rowlandson
Rowlandson, Mary. The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.	Compilation of downloadable texts from various sources.
Henwood, Dawn. “Mary Rowlandson and the Psalms: The Textuality of Survival.” Early American Literature 32, no. 2 (1997): 169-186.
Woodard, Maureen L. “Female Captivity and the Deployment of Race in Three Early American Texts.” Papers on Language & Literature 32, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 115-121.	Abstract: “Focusing mostly on female victims, captivity stories in early US literature addressed the fears of colonists who felt threatened by the power of the wilderness and its indigenous population. Woodard examines how three works by Mary Rowlandson, Susanna Rowson and Charles Brockden Brown invoke the images of female entrapment and transformation.”
Fitzpatrick, Tara. “The Figure of Captivity: The Cultural Work of the Puritan Captivity Narrative.” American Literary History 3, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 1-26.
Potter, Tiffany. “Writing Indigenous Femininity: Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative of Captivity.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 153-168.	Abstract: “Mary Rowlandson’s narrative of her captivity offers insight into the ideas of femininity and race in early colonial America through its depiction of Weetamoo, the squaw-sachem of the Wampanoags. Despite evidence that Weetamoo was quite well known as an enemy in King Philip’s War, Rowlandson refuses to acknowledge Weetamoo’s extraordinary status and power in her own culture. Instead, Rowlandson attempts to cast Weetamoo merely as a failure of the Eurocentric femininity articulated by Increase Mather in his Preface to the text-a femininity that Rowlandson works so hard to claim for herself in her representation of her own maternity, asexuality, and gender-appropriate production and exchange.”
Lydia Maria Child
Petitjean, Tom “Child’s Hobomok.” The Explicator 53, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 145-147.	A brief consideration of Child’s treatment of mysticism, race, and gender in Hobomok.
Cox, James H. “The Power of Sympathy: European American Women Novelists Imagine Indigenous Absence.” American Transcendental Quarterly 15, no. 3 (Sep 2001): 191-208.	Abstract: “Cox illustrates how colonial plots constructed by men and women frequently diverge and, then, clearly reconverge to culminate in Native American absence. The consistent creation of Indians by women and men in order to author them into absence suggests there are narrative or imaginative limitations to sympathy as a mode of resistance to colonialism.”
Pertinent Texts and Images in the 19th Century	Images of the early American frontier, from the University of Virginia American Studies site; includes an excerpt from Hobomok.
Smith, Henry Nash. The Virgin Land.	Originally published in 1950, this book articulates the dominant “frontier thesis” of American literature in the 20th century. Talks about treatments of Native Americans and the advancing frontier in a number of (mostly male) authors. Includes interesting links. From the University of Virginia Hypertexts archive.
James Fenimore Cooper	Cooper page at Dr. Donna Campbell’s American Authors site. His novels represented to Child and her readers the dominant thinking about race and the frontier in America—and are mentioned immediately in Child’s Preface.
Catherine Maria Sedgwick	Sedgwick page at Dr. Donna Campbell’s American Authors site. The other author often mentioned with Child, Sedgwick wrote Hope Leslie in 1827, another book showing romance across the color line.
Psalm 88	Mr. Conant reads this on the death of his wife (p. 111).
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne	Hawthorne page at Dr. Donna Campbell’s American Authors site.
Hawthorne in Salem	Web site by North Shore Community College with the Peabody Essex Museum, House of the Seven Gables Historic Site, and the Salem Maritime National Historic Site.
American Transcendentalism Web	Web site hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University.
American Transcendentalism	From Dr. Donna Campbell’s American Authors site.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture	Multimedia archive directed by Stephen Railton, University of Virginia.
Stowe texts online	From Web site A Celebration of Women Writers; scroll down to “Stowe.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe	Stowe page at Dr. Donna Campbell’s American Authors site.
Harris, Susan K. “The Female Imaginary in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing.” The New England Quarterly 66, no. 2 (June 1993): 179-198.
Baker, Dorothy Z. “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly: The Construction of The Minister’s Wooing.” Studies in American Fiction 28 (2000): 27-38.
Wilson, Christopher P. “Tempests and Teapots: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing.” The New England Quarterly 58, no. 4 (Dec. 1985): 554-577.
Walt Whitman
The Walt Whitman Archive	A fabulous resource! Scholarly and complete. Even has a recording of his voice!
Walt Whitman electronic texts	From the University of Virginia Library
Samuel Clemens / Mark Twain
PBS: Mark Twain	Web site for the Ken Burns film with “scrapbook” materials.
Mark Twain in His Times	Web site by Stephen Railton, University of Virginia
American Authors: Mark Twain	Compiliation of resources by Dr. Donna Campbell, Washington State University.
Mark Twain House and Museum