A Young Girl Reading: Martha’s Quest through Literature and Realism in Martha Quest

This paper examines the young heroine’s ambivalent relationship with books in Doris Lessing’s coming-of-age novel Martha Quest. Martha, a young British girl growing up in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the wake of World War II, is a voracious young reader who reads extensively in order to make sense of the world in which she is living. Sometimes the books she reads lead her to think critically and challenge the canonical authorities and patriarchal society; however, at times her reading experience is also unsettling and frustrating because the books she reads are mostly produced within a biased system she intends to go beyond. The paper analyzes how Martha relies on books to reshape her national identity and personal life, and how she deals with the discrepancy between the world represented in books and reality in terms of Benedict Anderson’s concept of an ‘imagined community’. Furthermore, this paper also discusses how Martha’s portrait as a bewildered reader of realist literature mirrors Lessing’s own ambiguous relationship with her realist narratives

Feminizing the voice of literary authority: Sarah J. Hale's editorship of the "Ladies' Magazine" and "Godey's Lady's Book"

This study focuses on Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the Ladies' Magazine (1828-1836) and then Godey's Lady's Book (1837-1877). Contesting the perception of these popular women's magazines as anti-literary and as anti-feminist, I identify the importance of these magazines in the development of American literature and their relationship with American feminism. I argue that Hale redefined literary culture so as to encourage women's participation in that world and to establish her own authority. She did so by manipulating the domestic ideology pervasive in nineteenth-century America, specifically the notion of separate spheres for women and men and the belief in women's "natural" moral superiority. Rather than equate such domestic and separatist ideology with women's confinement in the home, Hale used it to increase women's intellectual and literary opportunities.This study explores the relationship between this domestic, separatist ideology and literary culture. Within the public feminine discourse of popular women's magazines, Hale promoted new ideas of the author, the reader, and the text. Resisting the image of the author as a scholarly gentleman, Hale contributed to the professionalization of authorship and worked to elevate the status of the "woman writer." She also battled negative representations of women's reading as dangerous or frivolous by presenting it both as an inherent part of the domestic space and as a means of women's intellectual achievement. Finally, Hale offered a femininized view of literary history and the development of genre, especially poetry and fiction. Again, she revised the aesthetics of these genres so as to defend women's engagement with literature as readers, writers, and editors.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio

Cultural Spillovers: Copyright, Conceptions of Authors, and Commercial Practices

Economists, sociologists, and legal scholars agree that intellectual-property law is fundamental to markets because legal control over copying motivates creative production. But in many markets, such as fashion and databases, there is little or no intellectual-property protection, yet producers still create innovative products and earn profits. Research on such “negative spaces” in intellectual-property law reveals that social norms can constrain copying and support creative production. This insight guided our analysis of markets for American literature before the Civil War, in both magazines (a negative space, where intellectual-property law did not apply) and books (a positive space, where intellectual-property law did apply). We observed similar understandings of authors and similar commercial practices in both spaces because many authors published the same work in both spaces. Based on these observations, we propose that cultural elements that develop in positive spaces may spill over to related negative spaces, inducing changes in buyers' and sellers' behavior in negative spaces. Our historical approach also revealed nuances—shades of gray—beyond the sharp distinction typically drawn between negative and positive spaces. In the 1850s, a few large-circulation magazine publishers began to claim copyright, but many still allowed reprinting and none litigated to protect copyright