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Browsing Universidade da Madeira by advisor "Abreu, Maria Zina Gonçalves de"

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  • The woman-as-witch in nineteenth-century american women´s historical fiction
    Publication . Gonçalves, Inês Tadeu Freitas; Costa, Jaime Becerra da; Abreu, Maria Zina Gonçalves de
    The counter-memorialisation of the women perceived as witches in the Salem witch hunt of 1692 in New England began soon after the happenings were over, in non-fiction, namely in history tracts. However, it was only by the nineteenth century that the cultural memory of the woman-as-witch of Salem became more broadly memorialised, using American fiction as its medium. This dissertation addresses the question of the counter-memorialisation of the woman-as-witch of Salem as Romantic heroines in nineteenth-century Romantic historical fiction, particularly by lesser-known American women authors. Thereby I aim to bring to light their contribution to advancing and establishing the (trans)cultural memory of the woman-as-witch of Salem. A cultural descriptive analysis of the corpus of literary mnemonic (re)imaginations is used to outline the transcultural, and counter-memory characteristics of Salem’s woman-as-witch as (re)created by the authors studied. Our selected corpus includes the following Romantic historicals, listed chronologically: Delusion, or The Witch of New England by Eliza Buckminster Lee; Philip English’s Two Cups by M.B Condit; Salem: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century by D.R. Castleton; South Meadows by Ella Taylor Disosway; Martha Corey: A Tale of the Salem Witchcraft by Constance Goddard Du Bois; Dorothy the Puritan: The Story of a Strange Delusion by Agusta Camplbel Watson, and Ye Lyttle Salem Maide: A Story of Witchcraft by Pauline Bradford Mackie. By complementing the existing comparative and contrasting studies, which assess mainly the historical accuracy of the literary representations of the events and key figures of the Salem witch hunt of 1692, our study goes beyond its history or the fiction about its history. It discusses its cultural memory instead.
    2023Doctoral thesis Open access Show more