Dorri Beam, Assistant Professor

Office: 419 Wheeler

Phone: 510-642-4037

Areas of Interest

American Literature to 1900. African American Literature. Gender & Sexuality Studies.

Professional Statement

I am currently finishing a book provisionally entitled Desire and Style in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing that will be published by Cambridge University Press. It returns to the archive to investigate a style of prose writing by women that reviewers called "highly wrought" and recovers the political and aesthetic rationale behind the ornate, elaborate styles of Margaret Fuller, Ann Stephens, Mary Clemmer, Harriet Spofford and Pauline Hopkins, while looking forward to the politics of ornament in the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton. My book argues that these writers enhanced what they took to be a fundamental quality of language, its borderline status as embodiment and sign, to formulate alternative textual models of feminine presence in lush language that refuses the natural ontological slippage into the material female body. Highly wrought writing intervened in striking and self-conscious ways in the gendered dualisms of American romanticism. Desire and Style grounds women's literary experiments in the historical discourses--flower language, mesmerism, and theories of ornament--that interrogated the relation of matter to spirit and provided the context for women writers' dialogues with Emerson's theory of language, Hawthorne's watch over the borderland of "romance", and Poe's interest in undead women and animate ornament.

Selected Publications and Papers Delivered

I published a version of the final chapter of my book, on Pauline Hopkins' elaborate generic restyling of dime western and women's romance in her magazine novel, Winona, in *Recovering the Black Female Body* ed. Michael Bennett and Vanessa Dickerson (Rutgers UP 2001). A version of the chapter on Harriet Spofford will be published in *Unauthorized States* edited by Ivy Wilson and Dana Luciano. An essay entitled "Constance Fenimore Woolson, Henry James, and Figures in the Carpet" is forthcoming in *Aesthetic Dimensions* edited by Christopher Looby and Cindy Weinstein (Columbia UP). I serve as an elected Board Member of the MLA's Margaret Fuller Society.

Office Hours

Thursdays, by appt.