Secret Histories
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Secret Histories

A New Era in Constance Fenimore Woolson Scholarship

Edited by Kathleen Diffley, Caroline Gebhard and Cheryl Torsney

Foreword by Anne Boyd Rioux

Afterword by Edoarda Grego

Title Details

Pages: 256

Illustrations: 10 b&w images

Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 03/15/2025

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6984-6

List Price: $29.95

Web PDF

Pub Date: 03/15/2025

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6986-0

List Price: $29.95

EPUB

Pub Date: 03/15/2025

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6985-3

List Price: $29.95

Hardcover

Pub Date: 03/15/2025

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6983-9

List Price: $119.95

Secret Histories

A New Era in Constance Fenimore Woolson Scholarship

Edited by Kathleen Diffley, Caroline Gebhard and Cheryl Torsney

Foreword by Anne Boyd Rioux

Afterword by Edoarda Grego

A reexamination of a Gilded Age author and her abiding influence

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  • Description
  • Reviews
  • Contributors

The eighteen essays in this volume explore Constance Fenimore Woolson’s prodigious range in period and genre as well as place, from the Great Lakes to the defeated South and across storied Europe to the Mediterranean. The whole of her professional life comes alive in this enlightening collection’s triptych.

The first section, “A Writer’s Experiments,” reveals that Woolson’s play with familiar genres and unfamiliar characters began during the 1870s and extended until she died in 1894. Consistently, she tested the limits of representing women’s labor and their erotic desires.

The second section, “Postbellum Souths,” follows Woolson’s travels through a land ravaged by war and injustice. Drawing on theories of travel, collective memory, the Lost Cause, religious controversy, and a race-bound region, these essays expose both the smugness of visitors and the agendas of residents that Woolson was among the first postwar writers to portray.

The third section, “Through an International Lens,” considers expatriate perceptions of European and Mediterranean cultures as well as misconceptions about the Gilded Age United States. Here and throughout this volume, responses to Woolson’s travel sketches mingle with assessments of her fiction and poetry, while her encounters with the writing of other Americans demonstrate how regularly Woolson made her century’s literary terrain more subtle and complex.

This volume is a timely, innovative, diverse, multidisciplinary array of organically arranged contributions that collectively highlight the contemporary relevance of Woolson’s fiction.

—Paola Gemme, professor of English, Arkansas Tech

This collection charts new territory in the study of Constance Fenimore Woolson, regionalist writing, transatlantic literature, and nineteenth-century literary history.

—Whitney Womack Smith, chair and professor of English, Miami University, coeditor of Representing Rural Women

Lisa West

Etta Madden

Kristin M. Comment

Susan L. Roberson

Sidonia Serafini

Aaron J. Rovan

Kathryn McKee

Karen Tracey

John Lowe

Lisa Nais

Sharon Kennedy-Nolle

Katherine Barrett Swett

Heather Hartley

About the Author/Editor

Kathleen Diffley (Editor)
KATHLEEN DIFFLEY is professor emerita at the University of Iowa and director of the Civil War Caucus. She is the author of The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861-1876 (Georgia) and editor of Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894.

Caroline Gebhard (Editor)
CAROLINE GEBHARD is professor emerita at Tuskegee University. She is a founding member of the Woolson Society and coeditor of Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919.

Cheryl B. Torsney (Editor)
CHERYL B. TORSNEY is program manager for leadership and career studies at Temple University. A founding member of the Woolson Society, she is the author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry and the editor of Critical Essays on Constance Fenimore Woolson.