Christa Holm Vogelius: Original Copy, Gebunden

Blurb

"When critics of poet Phyillis Wheatley, the first African American to publish a collection of poetry, dismiss her work as derivative, they fail to see her writing as part of a new creative pantheon of works that are structured as a conversation between artistic allies. Ekphrasis, the literary description of a work of visual art, reveals a particularly interesting form of copying where the artwork in question becomes a kind of mediated space between author and reader. This practice, then, becomes the emblematic form of literature as collective production. Original Copy frames ekphrasis and other forms of literary and visual copy-work as key practices for understanding the discussions of nationalism, originality, and gender that dominated US literary circles during the first half of the nineteenth century. Christa Holm Vogelius focuses on four major writers of the period-Phillis Wheatley, Margaret Fuller, Sophia Hawthorne, and Henry Longfellow-to offer a narrative of a self-consciously feminine antebellum literary culture that was equally invested in literary nationality and convention. Bridging studies of literary nationalism and transnationalism, scholarship on gender in nineteenth-century literary culture, and aesthetic and media theory, this book argues the significance of both imitation and intimate author-reader relations to the development of an American literature"--