Catharine Maria Sedgwick

Jenifer Elmore (Florida Atlantic University)
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Catharine Maria Sedgwick was the most famous and successful American woman fiction writer in the first half of the nineteenth century. During her lifetime, literary critics and historians routinely recognized her as a primary founder of a distinctly American literature, along with Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Sedgwick’s close friend, William Cullen Bryant. Nevertheless, Sedgwick nearly passed out of literary history altogether before scholars began to reexamine her work in the 1970s and subsequently restored her to a place of prominence in criticism and the classroom. With modern scholarly editions of her novels in print, various selections of her fiction included in the major American teaching anthologies, essays on her work in numerous volumes of criticism, and with…

3091 words

Citation: Elmore, Jenifer. "Catharine Maria Sedgwick". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 July 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3995, accessed 19 March 2024.]

3995 Catharine Maria Sedgwick 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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