Nineteenth-century literary women and the temperance tradition : temperance rhetoric in the fiction of Lydia Sigourney, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on January 29, 2007)Vita.Thesis (Ph. D.) University of Missouri-Columbia 2007.Although historically scholars have viewed nineteenth-century temperance as a lesser movement in a century characterized by other weighty reforms, this dissertation builds on recent scholarship that redirects attention to the multi-faceted nature of women's temperance work as it coalesced women for important cultural work. Just as the women's temperance movement as a whole has suffered from critical neglect, so too have the literary productions of temperance women. In this work, I analyze how - despite the characteristic sentimental, generic stereotypes often associated with temperance literature -nineteenth-century female authors of temperance literature did in fact utilize this genre to respond to a wide array of social and political concerns. For Lydia Sigourney, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, the temperance issue does not stand alone; my work illuminates how to various degrees and in diverse ways, temperance is intimately connected with topics such as women's concerns, community, capitalism and reform among a host of other pertinent social topics.Includes bibliographical reference