I'm curious what you-all think of changes in printing and in literary forms in the 19th Century, both in the US and in Western Europe.
Jerome McGann's Black Riders and Cathy Davidson's Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America has too, but I still find myself swimming a bit.
I'm curious too about the role of female authors and readers in this. Davidson makes a lot out of this, as do Baym and some of the other femcrits. Some familiar (old fashioned?) constructions describe a 19th Century a progress towards mutually verifiable perceptions and prosaic, plotted narrative -- things held to go together. These people respond with people like Jewett, whose Firs, while temporally sequential, does not seem dependent on a tight sense of causal relations between episodes. Yet these authors seem to accept the dicta of mutually verifiable reality more thoroughly than those who propound the theory.
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I haven't read The Country of the Pointed Firs yet, but I believe there are many exceptions to the saccharine "domestic novel" or "domestic fiction" that was written by women for women in the 19th century. Even within domestic novels, there are often strategies employed to push the envelope of the genre and some of them are more innovative than what other male writers at the time were doing. Recently, before this blog started up, Greg Stone and I read Kate Chopin's The Awakening and some of her short stories. They're quite ahead of their time and daring in their philosophizing of individual liberty for women -- both in their ability to express their sexuality and their ability to work at a chosen profession.
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