This unit of study for junior-high level high-ability language arts students explores five themes in 19th century American history through literature of the times: romanticism, transcendentalism, abolitionism, industrialism, and feminism. Each of the five "isms" has its own "literature box" that contains appropriate documents…

Contributes to scholarship on film and feminism by showing how James Whale's film attempts to excise or severely delimit the disturbing critique of the Romantic politics of gender in Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein." Discusses parthenogenesis, showing how the novel critiques the Romantic rhetorical reconstructions of masculine…

In recent years the High Romantic concept of the solitary author has been intensely challenged. Compositionists and various theorists have deconstructed the concept of isolated authorship and critiqued the Romantic notion of individual genius. Meanwhile, the reconstruction of the female literary tradition introduced the question of gender and…

Argues that Emily Dickinson's gender and genre moved her away from American Transcendentalism and toward pragmatism. Suggests that Dickinson's choice of poetry forced her to formulate a self that the American Transcendental prose writers could evade, and that her gender freed her from the restraints that the Romantic movement placed on women. (TB)