Literature and Responsibility

Carolyn L. Karcher is a specialist in American literature and professor emerita in Temple University (Philadelphia, United States). She is the academic invited to give the session "Literature and Responsibility" within the Cycle Gènere i crítica de la cultura, of the Centre Dona i Literatura. Karcher is the author of Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America (Louisiana State University Press, 1980) and The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Duke University Press, 1994), as well as editor of the novels Hobomok & Other Writings on Indians by Lydia Maria Child (1986), Hope Leslie by Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1998), Bricks Without Straw: A Novel by Albion Tourgée (2009), and of the anthology A Lydia Maria Child Reader (1997). She has published articles on feminist writing and abolitionism and on the work, among others, of Orestes A. Brownson, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ida B. Wells and Frances Wright. Her teaching career has been recognized with the Great Teacher Award and the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. The session will be in English.