Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America. By Sara L. Crosby. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press. 2016. 223 pp. Paper, $65.00; e-book, $65.00.
Poison, women, and popular writing have long been associated in European culture, as the trope of the poisonous woman disparaged unauthorized writing and those who read it. Crosby analyzes newsprint, trial transcripts, pamphlets, novels, plays, and poems to demonstrate that the female poisoner was depicted in more conflicting and occasionally positive terms in the United States than in Europe. The book explores two major types of female poisoners: the romantic poisoner, depicted by John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe, and the democratic poisoner, depicted by Nathaniel Hawthorne and George Lippard.
Dismantling Slavery: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Formation of the Abolitionist Discourse, 1841–1851. By Nilgün Anadolu-Okur. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press. 2016. xii, 330 pp. Cloth,...
