With the transformation and expansion of the nineteenth-century American literary canon in the past two decades, the work of the era's American women poets has come to be widely anthologized. But scant scholarship has arisen to make full sense of it. From School to Salon responds to this glaring gap. Mary Loeffelholz presents the work of nineteenth-century women poets in the context of the history, culture, and politics of the times. She uses a series of case studies to discuss why the recovery of nineteenth-century women's poetry has been a process of anthologization without succeeding analysis. At the same time, she provides a much-needed account of the changing social contexts through which nineteenth-century American women became poets: initially by reading, reciting, writing, and publishing poetry in school, and later, by doing those same things in literary salons, institutions created by the high-culture movement of the day. Along the way, Loeffelholz provides detailed analyses of the poetry, much of which has received little or no recent critical attention. She focuses on the works of a remarkably diverse array of poets, including Lucretia Maria Davidson, Lydia Sigourney, Maria Lowell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Emily Dickinson, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Annie Fields. Impeccably researched and gracefully written, From School to Salon moves the study of nineteenth-century women's poetry to a new and momentous level.

The genre of mélodrame à grand spectacle that emerged in the boulevard theatres of Paris in the 1790s - and which was quickly exported abroad - expressed the moral struggle between good and evil through a drama of heightened emotions. Physical gesture, mise en scène and music were as important in communicating meaning and passion as spoken dialogue. The premise of this volume is the idea that the melodramatic aesthetic is central to our understanding of nineteenth-century music drama, broadly defined as spoken plays with music, operas and other hybrid genres that combine music with text and/or image. This relationship is examined closely, and its evolution in the twentieth century in selected operas, musicals and films is understood as an extension of this nineteenth-century aesthetic. The book therefore develops our understanding of opera in the context of melodrama's broader influence on musical culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book will appeal to those interested in film studies, drama, theatre and modern languages as well as music and opera.