This book investigates how popular American literature and film transformed the poisonous woman from a misogynist figure used to exclude women and minorities from political power into a feminist hero used to justify the expansion of their public roles.
Sara L. Crosby is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University at Marion, USA, and author of Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America (2016).
Chapter 1. Introduction. Making the Medicinal Poisoner.- Chapter 2. A Quarrel of Poisons: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Homeopathic Poisoner.- Chapter 3. Playing Poison: Mary Webb’s Antidote to the Tom Shows.- Chapter 4. With Friends Like These: E. D. E. N. Southworth and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Pathological Poisoner.- Chapter 5. The Lady Doctor and the Vamp: How Louisa May Alcott, Theda Bara, and Thomas Dixon, Jr., Killed the Poisonous Woman.- Chapter 6. Conclusion and Coda. A Presidential Election, My Cousin Rachel, and the Lingering Effects of the Medicinal Poisoner.
