Maria O'Malley is professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, where she teaches American literature. She coedited Beyond 1776: Globalizing the Cultures of the American Revolution.
Request Academic Copy
Please copy the ISBN for submitting review copy form
Description
"O'Malley analyzes five eighteenth-and nineteenth-century literary works that reveal women's engagement with the processes of empire in North America. . . . Her close reading of the five texts demonstrates how women's engagement with empire-building varied based on historical context and their individual identity. . . . Imaginary Empires serves as a valuable reminder that historians should engage with literary criticism in order to better understand the historical actors that are the subject of their studies."--Journal of Southern History "Maria O'Malley sees women writing a different kind of history, one that remembers rather than represses the founding violence of America, and then imagines a future beyond that reckoning."--Gretchen Murphy, author of New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State "This book is an important contribution to the expanding field of research about the ways women participated in the work of empire-building in early America. The chapters are engaging, providing nuanced readings of a range of texts as well as strategies for thinking about how women authors and characters proffered alternative futures for the United States."--Mary McAleer Balkun, author of The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture