Document Type
Article
Language
eng
Format of Original
23 p.
Publication Date
Spring 2012
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Source Publication
Library Trends
Source ISSN
0024-2594
Original Item ID
doi: 10.1353/lib.2012.0017
Abstract
Beginning with an overview of the debate over American women writers and the academic canon, this essay inventories four clusters of American women writers—domestic novelists, regionalists, modernists, and writers of diverse ethnicities—within a representative sampling of small-town public libraries across the Midwest from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The survey reveals some surprising disjunctures that run counter to trends in the academy. It also highlights the role publishers and bibliographers have played in establishing favored texts for a general readership and demonstrates that publishers of literary classics and bibliographies geared toward librarians have not always promoted the same texts as their academic counterparts. On the whole, it concludes, women writers fared quite well in the hands of publishers and public libraries promoting “the classics” at the same time that they suffered at the hands of major textbook publishers and scholarly editors intent on defining “the canon.”
Recommended Citation
Wadsworth, Sarah, "Canonicity and the American Public Library: The Case of American Women Writers" (2012). English Faculty Research and Publications. 105.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/english_fac/105
Comments
Accepted version. Library Trends, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Spring, 2012): 706-28. DOI: 10.1353/lib.2012.0017. © 2012 Johns Hopkins University Press. Used with permission.