Sylvia Jenkins Cook's Books

Clothed in Meaning

Literature, Labor, and Cotton in Nineteenth-Century America

By: Sylvia Jenkins Cook

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Clothed in Meaning

Literature, Labor, and Cotton in Nineteenth-Century America

By: Sylvia Jenkins Cook

The rise of both the empire of cotton and the empire of fashion in the nineteenth century brought new opportunities for sartorial self-expression to millions of ordinary people who could now afford to dress in style and assert their physical presence. Millions of laborers toiling in cotton fields and producing cotton cloth in industrial mills faced a brutal reality of exploitation, servitude, and regimentation—yet they also had a profound desire to express their selfhood. Another transformative force of this era—the rise of literary publication and the radical extension of literacy to the working class—opened an avenue for them to do so. Cloth and clothing provide potent tropes not only for physical but also for intellectual forms of self-expression. Drawing on sources ranging from fugitive slave narratives, newspapers, manifestos, and mill workers’ magazines to fiction, poetry, and autobiographies, Clothed in Meaning examines the significant part played by mill workers and formerly enslaved people, many of whom still worked picking cotton, in this revolution of literary self-expression. They created a new literature from their palpable daily intimacy with cotton, cloth, and clothing, as well as from their encounters with grimly innovative modes of work. In the materials of their labor they discovered vivid tropes for formulating their ideas and an exotic and expert language for articulating them. The harsh conditions of their work helped foster in their writing a trenchant irony toward the demeaning reduction of human beings to “hands” whose minds were unworthy of interest. Ultimately, Clothed in Meaning provides an essential examination of the intimate connections between oppression and luxury as recorded in the many different voices of nineteenth-century labor.

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Page Count

319

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472126792

ISBN 13

9780472126798

Clothed in Meaning

Literature, Labor, and Cotton in Nineteenth-Century America

By: Sylvia Jenkins Cook

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Clothed in Meaning

Literature, Labor, and Cotton in Nineteenth-Century America

By: Sylvia Jenkins Cook

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319

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University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472126792

ISBN 13

9780472126798

From Tobacco Road to Route 66

The Southern Poor White in Fiction

By: Sylvia Jenkins Cook

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From Tobacco Road to Route 66

The Southern Poor White in Fiction

By: Sylvia Jenkins Cook

In the early nineteenth century, the southern poor white had a reputation for comic vulgarity and absurd violence; postbellum writers saw him as a quaint peasant; the 1920s transformed him into a revolutionary proletarian. Of the literary treatments discussed, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath emerges as a skillful compromise of documentary accuracy and political daring by reviving the tradition of degeneracy. Originally published in 1976. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

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284

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UNC Press Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807873306

ISBN 13

9780807873304

Working Women, Literary Ladies

The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration

By: Sylvia J. Cook

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Working Women, Literary Ladies

The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration

By: Sylvia J. Cook

Working Women, Literary Ladies explores the simultaneous entry of working-class women in the United States into wage-earning factory labor and into opportunities for mental and literary development. It is the first book to examine the fascinating exchange between the work and literary spheres for laboring women in the rapidly industrializing America of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As women entered the public sphere as workers, their opportunities for intellectual growth expanded, even as those same opportunities were often tightly circumscribed by the factory owners who were providing them. These developments, both institutional and personal, opened up a range of new possibilities for working-class women that profoundly affected women of all classes and the larger social fabric. Cook examines the extraordinary and diverse literary productions of these working women, ranging from their first New England magazine of belles lettres, The Lowell Offering, to Emma Goldman's periodical, Mother Earth; from Lucy Larcom's epic poem of female factory life, An Idyl of Work, to Theresa Malkiel's fictional account of sweatshop workers in New York, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker. This vital new book traces the hopes and tensions generated by the expectations of working-class women as they created a wholly new way of being alive in the world.

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304

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0190296275

ISBN 13

9780190296278

Working Women, Literary Ladies

The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration

By: Sylvia Jenkins Cook

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Working Women, Literary Ladies

The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration

By: Sylvia Jenkins Cook

This is an exploration of the simultaneous entry of working-class women in the US into wage-earning factory labour and into opportunities for mental and literary development. The text traces the hopes and tensions generated by expectations of their gender and class.

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292

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199870543

ISBN 13

9780199870547

Working Women, Literary Ladies

The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration

By: Sylvia J. Cook

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Working Women, Literary Ladies

The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration

By: Sylvia J. Cook

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303

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Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199716617

ISBN 13

9780199716616

From Tobacco Road to Route 66

The Southern Poor White in Fiction

By: Sylvia Jenkins Cook

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From Tobacco Road to Route 66

The Southern Poor White in Fiction

By: Sylvia Jenkins Cook

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

284

Publisher

UNC Press Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807873306

ISBN 13

9780807873304

Book's by Sylvia Jenkins Cook

Clothed in Meaning

Clothed in Meaning

Clothed in Meaning

Clothed in Meaning

From Tobacco Road to Route 66

From Tobacco Road to Route 66

Working Women, Literary Ladies

Working Women, Literary Ladies

Working Women, Literary Ladies

Working Women, Literary Ladies

Working Women, Literary Ladies

Working Women, Literary Ladies

From Tobacco Road to Route 66

From Tobacco Road to Route 66

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