Nina Baym
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Nina Baym (1936–2018) was an American literary critic and literary historian. She was professor of English at the from 1963 to 2004.
She is the mother of Nancy Baym.
She was an authority on women's fiction on female reading habits. She wrote the 1978 Women's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870 (1978).
She is the author of "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors" (American Quarterly 1981)
She is an expert on women writers while taking the focus off "great" writers according to a supposed unchanging value judgment and placing it instead on the dynamics of literary professionalism.
Elaine Showalter has called Baym's Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 (2011, University of Illinois Press), "the first comprehensive guide to women's writing in the old West," an immediately "standard and classic text." This book uncovers and describes the western-themed writing in diverse genres of almost 350 American women, most of them unknown today but many of them successful and influential in their own time. Since 1991 Baym has served as General Editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Beginning with the 9th edition of the anthology (the current is the eighth) Robert Levine, of the University of Maryland, will assume the general editorship.
Books authored or edited
- Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927, Illinois, 2011
- Norton Anthology of American Literature, 3rd through 8th editions. W.W. Norton, 1985–present.
- American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences. Rutgers, 2002.
- American Women Writers and the Work of History. Rutgers, 1995.
- Feminism and American Literary History: Essays. Rutgers, 1992.
- Woman's Fiction. Cornell University Press, 1978.
- Shape of Hawthorne's Career. Cornell University Press, 1976.
See also
