Books in French are on www.livres-cinema.info
MENU   

Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

From Poisoners to Doctors, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Theda Bara

by Sara L. Crosby

Type
Essays
Subject
Silent Cinema
Keywords
silent cinema, women, representation
Publishing date
2018
Publisher
Palgrave MacMillan
Collection
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Language
English
Size of a pocketbookRelative size of this bookSize of a large book
Relative size
Physical desc.
Hardcover • 274 pages
6 x 8 ¼ inches (15 x 21 cm)
ISBN
978-3-319-96462-1
User Ratings
no rating (0 vote)

Average rating: no rating

0 rating 1 star = We can do without
0 rating 2 stars = Good book
0 rating 3 stars = Excellent book
0 rating 4 stars = Unique / a reference

Your rating: -

Book Presentation:
This book investigates how popular American literature and film transformed the poisonous woman from a misogynist figure used to exclude women and minorities from political power into a feminist hero used to justify the expansion of their public roles. Sara Crosby locates the origins of this metamorphosis in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Harriet Beecher Stowe applied an alternative medical discourse to revise the poisonous Cassy into a doctor. The newly “medicalized” poisoner then served as a focal point for two competing narratives that envisioned the American nation as a multi-racial, egalitarian democracy or as a white and male supremacist ethno-state. Crosby tracks this battle from the heroic healers created by Stowe, Mary Webb, Oscar Micheaux, and Louisia May Alcott to the even more monstrous poisoners or “vampires” imagined by E. D. E. N. Southworth, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theda Bara, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and D. W. Griffith.

About the Author:
Sara L. Crosby is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University at Marion, USA, and author of Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America (2016).

Press Reviews:
"Crosby provides a fascinating, beautifully researched look at how American literature and culture defined and redefined the woman poisoner from early in the 19th century to early in the 20th. At the center of this story connecting writers and performers as different as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Theda Bara is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s poisonous woman in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the defiant enslaved healer, Cassy. This is scholarship at its best―lucid, provocative, totally engaging. " (Elizabeth Ammons, Harriet H. Fay Professor of Literature, Tufts University, USA)

"Provocative and persuasive, Women in Medicine introduces us to the nineteenth century’s poisonous woman who becomes either her polar opposite, the heroic doctor, or the newly pathologized vampire. Ranging from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Cassy to Theda Bara’s film vamp, Sara Crosby’s portrayal of this quintessential figure is as much a page turner as the popular texts Sara Crosby interrogates. " (Mary Kelley, Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan, USA)

See the publisher website: Palgrave MacMillan

> On a related topic:

The Othering of Women in Silent Film:Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts

The Othering of Women in Silent Film (2023)

Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts

by Barbara Tepa Lupack

Subject: Silent Cinema

The Silent Feminists:America's First Women Directors, Rowman & Littlefield Edition

The Silent Feminists (2022)

America's First Women Directors, Rowman & Littlefield Edition

by Anthony Slide

Subject: Silent Cinema

When Women Wrote Hollywood:Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry

When Women Wrote Hollywood (2018)

Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry

Dir. Rosanne Welch

Subject: Silent Cinema

Silent Women:Pioneers of Cinema

Silent Women (2016)

Pioneers of Cinema

Dir. Karen Day

Subject: Silent Cinema

Movie-Struck Girls:Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon

Movie-Struck Girls (2000)

Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon

by Shelley Stamp

Subject: Silent Cinema

Picturing American Modernity:Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema

Picturing American Modernity (2008)

Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema

by Kristen Whissel

Subject: Silent Cinema

Working Women on Screen:Paid Labour and Fourth Wave Feminism

Working Women on Screen (2025)

Paid Labour and Fourth Wave Feminism

Dir. Ellie Tomsett, Nathalie Weidhase and Poppy Wilde

Subject: Sociology

From La Strada to The Hours:Suffering and Sovereign Women in the Movies

From La Strada to The Hours (2024)

Suffering and Sovereign Women in the Movies

Dir. Vivian Pramataroff-Hamburger and Andreas Hamburger

Subject: Sociology

It's All in the Delivery:Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy

It's All in the Delivery (2024)

Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy

by Victoria Sturtevant

Subject: Sociology

14271 books listed   •   (c)2024-2025 cinemabooks.info   •