ANGELS WHO STEPPED OUTSIDE THEIR HOUSES: “AMERICAN TRUE WOMANHOOD” AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY (TRANS)NATIONALISMS

Bromell, Nicholas KPhan, Hoang GKnoper, RandallDahl, AdamHewagama, Gayathri M2024-04-262024-04-262020-022020-0210.7275/4akx-mw86https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/18092“Angels who Stepped Outside their Houses” examines the fashioning of a gendered white American middle-class Protestant subject called the “American true woman” as a fitting representation of the emerging new American nation, as reflected in the writings of white American women authors from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Locating the formation of this identity on a transnational plane, this work argues that in their myriad texts, these women authors reveal the significant role that imperial Britain and the non-national/not-yet-national colonial Orient played in the (de/)construction/(de/)centering of American true womanhood. For, in the face of a particular Englishness and an Oriental otherness that these texts produce, American true women become interstitial and ambivalent subjects.antebellumwhitewomanidealEnglandOrientArts and HumanitiesEnglish Language and LiteratureLiterature in English, North AmericaANGELS WHO STEPPED OUTSIDE THEIR HOUSES: “AMERICAN TRUE WOMANHOOD” AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY (TRANS)NATIONALISMSDissertation (Open Access)https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4902-8373