LEADER 05309nam 2200805 a 450 001 9910788582703321 005 20211005004432.0 010 $a1-283-89738-5 010 $a0-8122-0497-2 024 7 $a10.9783/9780812204971 035 $a(CKB)3240000000064721 035 $a(OCoLC)794700619 035 $a(CaPaEBR)ebrary10642753 035 $a(SSID)ssj0000606388 035 $a(PQKBManifestationID)11413303 035 $a(PQKBTitleCode)TC0000606388 035 $a(PQKBWorkID)10580261 035 $a(PQKB)10434292 035 $a(MdBmJHUP)muse8292 035 $a(DE-B1597)449371 035 $a(OCoLC)979756376 035 $a(DE-B1597)9780812204971 035 $a(Au-PeEL)EBL3442001 035 $a(CaPaEBR)ebr10642753 035 $a(CaONFJC)MIL420988 035 $a(MiAaPQ)EBC3442001 035 $a(EXLCZ)993240000000064721 100 $a20110118d2011 uy 0 101 0 $aeng 135 $aurcn||||||||| 181 $ctxt 182 $cc 183 $acr 200 14$aThe genius of democracy$b[electronic resource] $efictions of gender and citizenship in the United States, 1860-1945 /$fVictoria Olwell 205 $a1st ed. 210 $aPhiladelphia $cUniversity of Pennsylvania Press$dc2011 215 $a1 online resource (301 p.) 300 $aBibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph 311 0 $a0-8122-4318-8 311 0 $a0-8122-4324-2 320 $aIncludes bibliographical references (p. [267]-280) and index. 327 $tFront matter --$tContents --$tIntroduction: The Work of Genius --$tChapter 1. "It Spoke Itself ": Genius, Political Speech, and Louisa May Alcott's Work --$tChapter 2. Genius and the Demise of Radical Publics in Henry James's The Bostonians --$tChapter 3. Trilby: Double Personality, Intellectual Property, and Mass Genius --$tChapter 4. Mary Hunter Austin: Genius, Variation, and the Identity Politics of Innovation --$tChapter 5. Imitation as Circulation: Racial Genius and the Problem of National Culture in Jessie Redmon Fauset's There Is Confusion --$tCoda: Gertrude Stein in Occupied France --$tNotes --$tBibliography --$tIndex --$tAcknowledgments 330 $aIn the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, ideas of genius did more than define artistic and intellectual originality. They also provided a means for conceptualizing women's participation in a democracy that marginalized them. Widely distributed across print media but reaching their fullest development in literary fiction, tropes of female genius figured types of subjectivity and forms of collective experience that were capable of overcoming the existing constraints on political life. The connections between genius, gender, and citizenship were important not only to contests over such practical goals as women's suffrage but also to those over national membership, cultural identity, and means of political transformation more generally. In The Genius of Democracy Victoria Olwell uncovers the political uses of genius, challenging our dominant narratives of gendered citizenship. She shows how American fiction catalyzed political models of female genius, especially in the work of Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Mary Hunter Austin, Jessie Fauset, and Gertrude Stein. From an American Romanticism that saw genius as the ability to mediate individual desire and collective purpose to later scientific paradigms that understood it as a pathological individual deviation that nevertheless produced cultural progress, ideas of genius provided a rich language for contests over women's citizenship. Feminist narratives of female genius projected desires for a modern public life open to new participants and new kinds of collaboration, even as philosophical and scientific ideas of intelligence and creativity could often disclose troubling and more regressive dimensions. Elucidating how ideas of genius facilitated debates about political agency, gendered identity, the nature of consciousness, intellectual property, race, and national culture, Olwell reveals oppositional ways of imagining women's citizenship, ways that were critical of the conceptual limits of American democracy as usual. 606 $aAmerican fiction$y19th century$xHistory and criticism 606 $aAmerican fiction$y20th century$xHistory and criticism 606 $aAmerican fiction$xWomen authors$xHistory and criticism 606 $aWomen in public life$zUnited States$xHistory 606 $aWomen and democracy$zUnited States$xHistory 606 $aGenius 606 $aGenius in literature 606 $aWomen in literature 610 $aCultural Studies. 610 $aLiterature. 615 0$aAmerican fiction$xHistory and criticism. 615 0$aAmerican fiction$xHistory and criticism. 615 0$aAmerican fiction$xWomen authors$xHistory and criticism. 615 0$aWomen in public life$xHistory. 615 0$aWomen and democracy$xHistory. 615 0$aGenius. 615 0$aGenius in literature. 615 0$aWomen in literature. 676 $a813/.4093522 700 $aOlwell$b Victoria$01467625 801 0$bMiAaPQ 801 1$bMiAaPQ 801 2$bMiAaPQ 906 $aBOOK 912 $a9910788582703321 996 $aThe genius of democracy$93678358 997 $aUNINA