Responding to the rich generic and thematic diversity of the writing represented in "Nineteenth-century American Women Writers: An Anthology", also edited by Karen L. Kilcup, this critical reader, specifically designed to accompany the anthology, contains twelve original essays - ten newly-written - on a wide range of topics, together with an introductory overview by the editor. The volume explores for students and scholars the interwoven matters of history, canonicity, and criticism, highlighting the collective importance of nineteenth-century women's writing, and illuminating in particular the complex hybrid texts and shorter genres that many women produced. The essays address large conceptual issues and offer suggestive close readings of individual texts. They ask such questions as: How do these texts use and 'misuse' the conventions of their time to create new perspectives, forms, and voices? What are the connections between various kinds of texts, writers, and genres? How do issues of identity and location inform the writing and our interpretations of it? What aesthetic, cultural, and political issues do these writers raise, both in their content and in their formal experiments? The topics covered in this book include: literary nationalism and regionalism; Southern and western women writers; tradition and transformation in Native American and Mexican American women authors; race, reform, and sentimentality; disability, sentimentality and femininity; women's economic independence; spirituality and class in African-American women's literature; gender, genre, and feminist discourse; and, women poets and the cannon. The contributors to this book include: Judith Fetterley; Nancy A. Walker; Melody Graulich; Tiffany Ana Lopez; A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff; Jean Pfaelzer; Rosemarie Garland Thomson; Joyce Warren; Barbara McCaskill; Karen L. Kilcup; Annette Kolodny; and, Cheryl Walker.