Sympathy, madness, and crime : how four nineteenth-century journalists made the newspaper women's business / Karen Roggenkamp.

Author
Roggenkamp, Karen, 1969- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
  • Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, [2016]
  • ©2016
Description
xii, 168 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Availability

Copies in the Library

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Firestone Library - Stacks PN4888.W66 R64 2016 Browse related items Request

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    Subject(s)
    Publisher
    Summary note
    "In one of her escapades as a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, the renowned Nellie Bly feigned insanity in 1889 and slipped, undercover, behind the grim walls of Blackwell's Island mental asylum. She emerged ten days later with a vivid tale about life in a madhouse. Her asylum articles merged sympathy and sensationalism, highlighting a developing professional identity--that of the American newspaperwoman. The Blackwell's Island story is just one example of how newsƯpaperwomen used sympathetic rhetoric to depict madness and crime while striving to establish their credentials as professional writers. Working against critics who would deny them access to the newsroom, Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, Nellie Bly, and Elizabeth Jordan subverted the charge that women were not emotionally equipped to work for mass-market newspapers. They transformed their supposed liabilities into professional assets, and Sympathy, Madness, and Crime explores how, in writing about insane asylums, the mentally ill, prisons, and criminals, each deployed a highly gendered sympathetic language to excavate a professional space within a male-dominated workplace"--Publisher's website.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references (pages128-160) and index.
    Contents
    • Sympathy and the American newspaper woman
    • Representing institutions: asylums and prisons in American periodicals
    • Scenes of sympathy: Margaret Fuller's New-York Tribune reportage
    • Entering unceremoniously: Fanny Fern, sympathy, and tales of confinement
    • Making a spectacle of herself: Nellie Bly, stunt reporting, and marketed sympathy
    • Sympathy and sensation: Elizabeth Jordan, Lizzie Borden, and the female reporter in the late nineteenth-century
    • Afterword.
    Other title(s)
    How four nineteenth-century journalists made the newspaper women's business
    ISBN
    • 9781606352878 ((hardcover ; : alkaline paper))
    • 1606352873 ((hardcover ; : alkaline paper))
    LCCN
    2016008083
    OCLC
    935194538
    Statement on language in description
    Princeton University Library aims to describe library materials in a manner that is respectful to the individuals and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections we manage. Read more...
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