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  1. Home
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  3. Voices of the Nation
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
October 2009
Print publication year:
1998
Online ISBN:
9780511582684
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582684
Series:
Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (114)
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies, Literary Theory
Information

Book description

Throughout the nineteenth century, American fiction displayed a fascination with women's speech - describing how women's voices sound, what happens when women speak and what reactions their speech produces, especially in their male listeners. Voices of the Nation argues that closer inspection of these recurring descriptions also performed political work that has had a profound - though unspecified to date - impact on American culture. Commentaries on the female voice were propounded by writers such as Henry James, William Dean Howells and Noah Webster, and these texts played a central role in attempts to define and enforce the radical social changes instituted by the emerging bourgeoisie.

Reviews

Review of the hardback:‘… informative and illuminating.’

Source: Nineteenth-Century Literature

Review of the hardback:‘Voices of the Nation carves out an important space in the evolution of a more complex, nuanced understanding of the role of women in shaping nineteenth-century American public life and identity.’

Source: American Literary Realism

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