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On the path to citizenship
Author(s) -
Cananau Iulian
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/oli.12244
Subject(s) - ideology , citizenship , conceptual history , declaration , context (archaeology) , girl , politics , convention , history , field (mathematics) , sociology , history of literature , literature , gender studies , law , political science , social science , art , psychology , developmental psychology , mathematics , archaeology , pure mathematics
This essay introduces a new approach to the history of protest literature, and to literary history writing in general. My case studies investigate three antebellum American works by women that express discontent with women’s condition: the “Declaration of Sentiments” of the Seneca Falls Convention (1848), Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (published in 1861, but written probably between 1852 and 1857). Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s theory and practice of conceptual history, the essay includes an analysis of the semantic field of citizenship in these works with an aim to explore the textual politics of their protest within the conceptual and ideological context of antebellum America.