Publications PublicationsThe Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women's Literature in America, 1820-1860. University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
This book proposes that reading for an aesthetic grounded in the artistry of angry expression compels a reconceptualization of domestic literature by women. I analyze and contextualize expressions of anger in the texts of writers such as Lydia Maria Child, Maria W. Stewart, Fanny Fern, and Harriet Wilson as a way of tracing a specifically gendered tradition of literary nation-building that is shaped by anger at exclusion from the democratic promise of America.
"Academically on Course. " Inside Higher Ed. 2 September 2011.
"Edited Letter Collections as Epistolary Fictions: Imagining African American Women's History in Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends." In Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860. Ed. Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009. 249-267.
"Reading Published Letter Collections as Literary Texts:
Correspondence Between Maria Chabot and Georgia O'Keeffe, 1941-1949."
Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers
25.2 (2008): 239-250.
"Inventive Desperation: Anger, Violence, and Belonging in Mary Wilkins Freeman's and Sui Sin Far's Murderous Mother Stories."
American Literary
Realism 38.1 (Fall 2005): 18-31.
"Masking Volcanic Anger: The Repressive World of
Nineteenth-Century White Female Emotional Culture." Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies
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"Louisa May Alcott's 'Magic Inkstand': Little Women, Feminism, and The Myth of Regeneration." Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 19.1 (1998): 177-192.
"Anger in the House: Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall and the Redrawing of Emotional Boundaries in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America." Studies in the American Renaissance (1995): 251-261.
"'Thwarted Life, Mighty Hunger, Unfinished Work:' The Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Women Writing in America." ATQ: 19th C. American Literature and Culture 8.2 (June 1994): 97-118.
Review of Love and Marriage in Early African America. Ed. by Frances Smith Foster. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2008. Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 26.1 (2009): 171-172.
Review of Maria Chabot - Georgia O'Keeffe: Correspondence,
1941-1949.
Ed. by Barbara Buhler Lynes and Ann Paden. New Mexico Historical Review (Fall 2005): 451-452.
Review of Blood & Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937 by Sarah E. Gardner.
American Historical Review (December 2005): 1537.
"Changing Conversations, Shifting Paradigms: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Women's Literary Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century." College Literature 29.2 (April 2002).
Review of The Reader's Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse by Christine L. Krueger. Sex Roles 29.10 (Nov. 1993).