Loading...
2 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
- The woman-as-witch in nineteenth-century american women´s historical fictionPublication . Gonçalves, Inês Tadeu Freitas; Costa, Jaime Becerra da; Abreu, Maria Zina Gonçalves deThe 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.
- In a flight of fancy from Pendle to Salem – the cultural memory of the early modern woman as witch on both sides of the AtlanticPublication . Gonçalves, Inês Tadeu FreitasThe depiction of the composite and cumulative image of the early English modern woman as witch in the Pendle witch trials of 1612 (Lancashire, UK) does not differ significantly from the one later portrayed in the Salem witch trials of 1692 (New England, USA). It suggests that the cultural memory of the woman as witch had remained in the fancy of the early English immigrants, soared out of the British Isles and crossed the Atlantic into the North-American Continent. Thus, the mnemonic processes involved and how they unfol ded diachronically and geographically between and beyond the early modern English and colonial New England cultures, attest to the transculturality of the cultural memory of the woman as witch. We intend, first, to illustrate this by discussing some of the defining aspects of the (trans)cultural immaterial religious sites of memory of the early modern woman as witch, in both Pendle Hill in Lancashire England and in Salem in Massachu setts, New England (US). And, second, we highlight one of the material sites of the cultural memory between the 1612 Pendle Hill trials and the 1692 Salem witch trials regarding the English accusatorial procedures, as far as the crime of witchcraft was concerned.