Poetry and the Press: Women's Literary Publishing in Canadian Newspapers, 1850-1900

This dissertation explores the important role the nineteenth-century newspaper played as a vehicle through which literary women could participate in public life, and specifically how women poets used this textual space as a forum for the exercise of rhetorical power. The newspaper was a space where women writers could speak with authority on the issues that concerned and affected them – a space where they could contribute to the dialogue in which the newspaper participated and, in doing so, claim a place for themselves as authors. The poetry sections of the daily newspapers in Canada were thus far from politically neutral, and they are deserving of attention, I argue, because they illustrate the extent and complexity of women’s involvement in nineteenth-century literary culture in Canada. In each of my three chapters I consider the rhetorical strategies women used to assert themselves in the political – and the literary – worlds. Chapter One focuses on the Halifax Acadian Recorder between 1850 and 1870 and the ways women used sentimentality in their writing as a pedagogical tool, in terms of content and form, to teach their readers appropriate modes of compassionate response to the world around them. I suggest that sentimentalism’s seeming indulgence in emotion proved a method by which women could extend themselves beyond the confines of the domestic spaces that were their ostensible focus. Chapter Two focuses on the Montreal Star’s Sunday Reading section between 1871 and 1888 to show how women co-opted the language of religion, and specifically the language used to describe Christ, in order to link feminine moral authority to God’s spiritual authority, thereby suggesting the female poet’s message was sanctioned by God. Finally, Chapter Three focuses on the Toronto Evening Telegram between 1880 and 1900 and writers’ significant shift away from earlier models of feminine morality as they embraced the persona of the poet as spokesperson for the city, taking on municipal politics and urban affairs more explicitly towards the end of the nineteenth century than ever before. As they reached beyond the subjects that had previously defined their work, these authors also reached beyond definitions of authorship that reinforced those boundaries. Although we can see significant change over the course of the fifty years that shape my project, throughout this period the newspaper remained an essential part not just of how women accessed their audiences but how they inserted themselves into Canadian life broadly as interested and invested participants, and as authors.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.