Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America
- ISBN-10
- 1609384040
- ISBN-13
- 9781609384043
- Category
- Literary Criticism
- Pages
- 258
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2016-04-15
- Publisher
- University of Iowa Press
- Author
- Sara L. Crosby
Description
The nineteenth century was, we have been told, the “century of the poisoner,” when Britain and the United States trembled under an onslaught of unruly women who poisoned husbands with gleeful abandon. That story, however, is only half true. While British authorities did indeed round up and execute a number of impoverished women with minimal evidence and fomented media hysteria, American juries refused to convict suspected women and newspapers laughed at men who feared them. This difference in outcome doesn’t mean that poisonous women didn’t preoccupy Americans. In the decades following Andrew Jackson’s first presidential bid, Americans buzzed over women who used poison to kill men. They produced and devoured reams of ephemeral newsprint, cheap trial transcripts, and sensational “true” pamphlets, as well as novels, plays, and poems. Female poisoners served as crucial elements in the literary manifestos of writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to George Lippard and the cheap pamphleteer E. E. Barclay, but these characters were given a strangely positive spin, appearing as innocent victims, avenging heroes, or engaging humbugs. The reason for this poison predilection lies in the political logic of metaphor. Nineteenth-century Britain strove to rein in democratic and populist movements by labeling popular print “poison” and its providers “poisoners,” drawing on centuries of established metaphor that negatively associated poison, women, and popular speech or writing. Jacksonian America, by contrast, was ideologically committed to the popular—although what and who counted as such was up for serious debate. The literary gadfly John Neal called on his fellow Jacksonian writers to defy British critical standards, saying, “Let us have poison.” Poisonous Muse investigates how they answered, how they deployed the figure of the female poisoner to theorize popular authorship, to validate or undermine it, and to fight over its limits, particularly its political, gendered, and racial boundaries. Poisonous Muse tracks the progress of this debate from approximately 1820 to 1845. Uncovering forgotten writers and restoring forgotten context to well-remembered authors, it seeks to understand Jacksonian print culture from the inside out, through its own poisonous language.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2016-04-15
- 223 pages
- Paperback
- University of Iowa Press
Similar books
-
Dangerous Muse: The Life Of Lady Caroline Blackwood
By Nancy SchoenbergerIn this first biography of Blackwood, Nancy Schoenberger deftly paints a complex woman who was captivating to her dying day.
-
Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood
By Nancy SchoenbergerShe herself died of cancer on Valentine's Day 1996, at the age of sixty-four. Dangerous Muse is the first biography of Lady Caroline Blackwood.
-
Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan
By Brett L. WalkerWilkening, Acid Rain Science and Politics in Japan, 126–31. Iguchi Taisen, Sumi Manabu, and Tanabe Shinsuke, “Endocrine Disruptor Issues in Japan,” Congenital Anomalies 40, no. 2 (2002): 106–19. Endocrine disruptors 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 ...
-
The Drowned Muse: Casting the Unknown Woman of the Seine Across the Tides of Modernity
By Anne-Gaëlle SaliotThe Drowned Muse is a study of the extraordinary destiny, in the history of European culture, of an object which could seem, at first glance, quite ordinary in the history...
-
Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: From Poisoners to Doctors, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Theda Bara
By Sara L. CrosbySee discussions in: Stephanie P. Browner, Profound Science and Elegant Literature: Imagining Doctors in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 135– 181; Cynthia Davis, Bodily and Narrative ...
-
Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China
By Yan Liu29 Fan Xingzhun, Zhongguo yixue shilüe, 57–96. 30 Fan Ka-wai, Dayi jingcheng. 31 Nathan Sivin's early study of Sun Simiao's alchemy remains an important reference. See Sivin, Chinese Alchemy. For a recent survey of medicine in this ...
-
Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice
By Phaedra C. PezzulloPezzullo examines these tours as a tactic of resistance and for their potential in reducing the cultural and physical distance between hosts and visitors."--BOOK JACKET.
-
Hounds of Zaroff: The Most Dangerous Game As a Persistent Muse to the Movies
By Michael Price, George TurnerThe book compiles kindred films, remakes, knockoffs, ripoffs, and toss-offs into a 250-page survey -- from the original film, through such famous titles as PREDATOR and THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, through rank obscurities like WALK THE ...
-
Dangerous Muse: A Life of Caroline Blackwood
By Nancy SchoenbergerCaroline Blackwood was a journalist and novelist.
-
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy
By Adrienne Mayor"--Paul Cartledge, author of Alexander the Great "Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King is an intriguing and highly readable new biography of one of the most controversial figures of antiquity, Mithradates--ruthless Hellenistic king, genocidaire ...