Abstract
This chapter introduces the essays on early American women’s writing; it revisits and extends Sharon Harris’s powerful concept of the woman’s “self-creating act” within the contexts of liminality and hybridity. Focusing on women’s literature spanning the eighteenth century, between 1709 and 1793, Allukian presents readers with a wide range of familiar themes in women’s literature—some of which include marriage, race, girlhood, education, diary-keeping, and place—that become defamiliarized when read through the lens of liminality and hybridity.
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A quick glance at just some of the scholarship on American women writers produced in the last two decades reveals the enduring influence of Harris’s argument across a range of themes and periods. Studies that cite and/or consult Harris’s seminal article include: Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America (2015) by William J. Scheick; Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (2012) by Mary Kelley; Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (2008) by Sarah M. S. Pearsall; Traveling Women: Narrative Visions of Early America (2006) by Susan Clair Imbarrato; “Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum America” (2002) by Mary Kelly; and To Read My Heart: The Journal of Rachel Van Dyke, 1810–1811 (2000), eds. Lucia McMahon and Deborah Schriver.
Works Cited
Harris, Sharon M. “Early American Women’s Self-Creating Acts.” Resources for American Literary Study, vol. 19, 1993, pp. 223–245.
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Cornell University Press, 1969.
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Allukian, K. (2018). Early American Women Writers: The Potentiality of the Continual Self-Creating Act. In: Jacobson, K., Allukian, K., Legleitner, RA., Allison, L. (eds) Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73851-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73851-2_2
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