{"id":680,"date":"2016-12-10T09:40:11","date_gmt":"2016-12-10T09:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=680"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:36:50","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:36:50","slug":"sari-edelstein-between-the-novel-and-the-news-the-emergence-of-american-womens-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2016\/12\/10\/sari-edelstein-between-the-novel-and-the-news-the-emergence-of-american-womens-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Sari Edelstein. Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women\u2019s Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sari Edelstein. Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women\u2019s Writing<\/em>. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. 226p., 7 ill. ISBN 9780813935904. US $29.50.<\/p>\n

Sari Edelstein\u2019s Between the Novel and the News <\/em>offers a bold corrective. While scholars and teachers have often connected male realist writers to journalism \u2013 the opening of Howells\u2019s The Rise of Silas Lapham<\/em> in which the eponymous character is being interviewed for a newspaper series is a quintessentially realist moment \u2013 critics have not given similar attention to how women writers in the long nineteenth century struggled to use and counter journalistic depictions of women and journalistic modes of narration. As Edelstein writes, \u201cwomen writers have long regarded the press an ideological problem whose social and political influence had serious repercussions for lived experience\u201d (148).<\/p>\n

She develops this argument over five major chapters that trace groups of works in conjunction with advancements in American journalism, a shorter introduction, and a conclusion. With a focus on Judith Sargent Murray\u2019s The Story of Margaretta<\/em>, the first chapter thinks about how women-authored seduction novels commented on the partisan fights carried out between Federalists and Republicans at the end of the eighteenth century. The second chapter discusses how authors, including Catherine Maria Sedgwick, used sentimentalism to establish an alternative \u2018truth\u2019 grounded in ethics rather than in the \u2018facts\u2019 touted by the penny papers that sensationalized women\u2019s (often dead) bodies in the 1830s. Interested in E.D.E.N. Southworth\u2019s The Hidden Hand<\/em> (1859) and antebellum story-papers, the third chapter considers \u201cthe era\u2019s anxieties about the breakdown of the national as well as the gender conventions that female authorship threatened to overturn\u201d (68). Chapter four examines how Elizabeth Keckley and Louisa May Alcott practiced eyewitness reportage in their fictionalized memoirs, which gestures toward the rise of embedded reporters during the Civil War. Edelstein concludes at the end of the century with a chapter that explores how various women writers \u2013 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ida Wells-Barnett, and Edith Eaton \u2013 \u201csimultaneously reproduce and criticize the sensationalist practices of mainstream newspapers\u201d and what came to be called yellow journalism (15).<\/p>\n

The great strength of this book is its ambition. Edelstein pulls together a range of authors who work over a long period of time and offers a compelling argument about how women, in order to write public words, necessarily had to grapple with the newspaper technologies and trends of their time. To make her temporal argument clear, Edelstein offers wonderful succinct explanations of print history \u2013 the developments in paper making and press technology as well as the corresponding trends in journalism \u2013 over the hundred-odd years featured in the book and compellingly ties them to standard and lesser-read fiction by women. The seven accompanying illustrations also do a great job communicating how newspapers were material and how their size, shape, organization, and formatting influenced their reception and communicated their intentions \u2013 facets with which these women authors grapple. My favorite image was of a Southern Civil War newspaper printed on old wallpaper which accompanies Edelstein\u2019s argument about Gilman\u2019s \u201cThe Yellow Wall-paper.\u201d<\/p>\n

Overall, the book is an impressive piece of scholarship that illuminates the complicated relationship between women\u2019s writing and journalism. It is indispensable to those seeking to understand more about U.S. periodical culture and American women\u2019s writing.<\/p>\n

Lydia G. Fash
\nBoston University<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sari Edelstein. Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women\u2019s Writing. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. 226p., 7 ill. ISBN 9780813935904. US $29.50. Sari Edelstein\u2019s Between the Novel and the News offers a bold corrective. While scholars and teachers have often connected male realist writers to journalism \u2013 the opening of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1904,1942,1947,1951],"class_list":["post-680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-authorship","tag-north-america","tag-periodicals-news","tag-printing"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":681,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions\/681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}