19th Century American Women's Fiction in the Bromley House Library and Beyond - Stephanie Palmer (Zoom event)

About

Online event - Bromley House Library
Saturday 22 January 2022 | 11am – 12:15pm
Tickets: £8

Britons read a lot of American fiction today, and American nineteenth-century fiction is currently well represented at the Bromley House. This talk will address why American fiction enjoyed such a wide readership in nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on materials in the Bromley House archives, it will illustrate the library holdings of the Bromley House and the Nottingham public library in their early days from books that remain on the shelves, to others that were on the shelves and have been lost through the passage of time, to still others considered too risqué to be included in the first place. By examining editions and reviews of works by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Edith Wharton, you will discover how the British developed a taste for novels of American life and for the short story as an art form. They'll also address how reviewers in magazines developed some of the earliest feminist literary criticism.

Stephanie Palmer is a Senior Lecturer of English at Nottingham Trent University, and she has also taught American literature in Turkey and in the United States.