“’Female Husbands’ In The 19th Century”
“ Stories of women dressing and posing as men dot the journalistic landscape of 19th century America — and Great Britain — according to Sarah Nicolazzo, who teaches literary history at the University of California, San Diego…
“This genre of narrative was already a popular one by the beginning of the 19th century,” Nicolazzo says. “Readers of newspapers, novels, pamphlets and other print forms clearly found this kind of story compelling and there was a long history of demand for it.”
Consequently, she says, “the historical record we tend to have about these cases — newspaper reports or fictionalized accounts — are texts written for a literary marketplace. They can certainly give us hints about the lives of the people actually described in these accounts, but they’re also clearly written to meet the expectations of readers who are familiar with an established genre.””
#NarrativesRunLives
