@article{baker_2020, title={Breathing at Blithedale: Air Quality, Sanitary Reform, and Hawthorne's Utopian Romance}, volume={27}, ISSN={["1759-1090"]}, DOI={10.1093/isle/isz101}, abstractNote={Loosely based on the demise of the Brook Farm utopian community (of which Hawthorne was briefly a member), Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, published in 1852, is most often read as a critique of Transcendentalist ideas or of the various reform movements they inspired.1 According to these readings, the characters all hope to create a new and better world at Blithedale, but fail due to the baggage—consisting of personal history or temperament—that each brings to the utopian experiment. Despite the novel’s engagement with contemporary philosophies and social movements, critics have tended to overlook the more subtle ways in which Hawthorne’s historical moment informs the narrative.2 In particular, they have overlooked the imagery of air and breath, which is everywhere in the novel, from the moment the protagonist and narrator “puff[s] out a final whiff of cigar smoke” (12) and leaves his bachelor apartment in the city, to his final musings on the failed experiment, when he observes that the atmosphere around Zenobia had been “rendered poisonous” (219) by the breath that Westervelt mingled with hers. Paying attention to this imagery reveals a novel in which Hawthorne actively borrows from the language of the mid-nineteenth-century conversations about air quality and public health, part of an incipient environmental movement focused not on land conservation but on the dangers of urban pollution. Hawthorne recognizes the clean air movement’s underlying anxieties about the fact that air is something that all human beings ultimately must share—no one can completely separate him or herself from air breathed by others—and he weaves them into the depiction of all the novel’s characters, especially Coverdale, the protagonist and narrator.}, number={4}, journal={ISLE-INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND ENVIRONMENT}, author={Baker, Anne}, year={2020}, pages={715–731} }
 @article{baker_2019, title={Trials of the Human Heart}, volume={54}, ISSN={["1534-147X"]}, DOI={10.1353/eal.2019.0055}, abstractNote={Reviewed by: Trials of the Human Heart by Susanna Rowson Anne Baker (bio) Trials of the Human Heart susanna rowson Introduction by melissa adams-campbell. Edited by richard s. pressman San Antonio, TX: Early American Reprints, 2017 326 pp. For nearly a decade now scholars of early American literature have been calling for readers and scholars to move beyond Charlotte Temple, Susanna Rowson's most popular work, and to pay more attention to the wide variety of texts Rowson produced in her long and constantly evolving career. In their 2011 special issue of Studies in American Fiction "Beyond Charlotte Temple," Jennifer Desiderio and Desiree Henderson argue that "Susanna Rowson is an author who deserves our full and engaged attention" (xxvii), and the essays in their valuable collection suggest that scholars are indeed taking notice of Rowson's plays, poetry, schoolbooks, and multiple novels. Despite this very welcome development, however, print editions of works other than Charlotte remain few and far between, thus making it challenging for scholars to introduce Rowson in all her variety to students or for nonspecialists to encounter Rowson as an author of far more than the sentimental phenomenon that is Charlotte. A new edition of Trials of the Human Heart (1795) published by Early American Reprints is thus a very welcome addition to the list of Rowson texts available in print. Aside from its being "the first best-selling novel in the United States," a key reason for the popularity of Charlotte Temple among teachers of early American literature has surely been its brevity; it's easy to find a place for Charlotte on a crowded syllabus. While Trials of the Human Heart is decidedly not brief (it was originally published in four volumes), it has other qualities that recommend it to educators trying to engage their students' interest in early American literature and culture. [End Page 601] Its heroine, Meriel Howard, is in many ways far more intriguing and likely to provoke lively discussion than poor Charlotte. The "trials" Meriel faces over the course of the sixteen years covered in the novel include attempted rape-incest at the hands of the man she believes to be her father, her nearly becoming a prostitute in order to provide for her destitute mother, an unhappy marriage, and shipwreck. As the novel draws to a close, however, the mood lightens and Meriel reunites with a lost true love and with her real parents, and finally achieves a happy marriage and home. These events surely make for an exciting narrative, but what gives the novel greater depth and interest is the fact that we hear these events narrated by Meriel herself in letters to her friend Celia, who remains throughout the novel in the French convent where Meriel herself spent her childhood. The epistolary form of the novel enables readers to consider Meriel's own explanations of how she chooses to respond to the various villains and misfortunes she encounters, and to ponder whether the naïve Meriel of the early chapters gains wisdom along with experience. Along with its epistolarity, gothic and picaresque elements in the novel make it an ideal vehicle for discussing the various subgenres of the eighteenth-century novel. The supplementary materials in this Early American Reprints edition are excellent. The footnotes are helpful enough to enable undergraduates to read the novel, and the introduction provides useful, concise information about Rowson's life and career and argues, insightfully, that Trials "exceeds the bounds of the marriage plot even as it delivers one" (11). The inclusion of the epilogue to "Slaves in Algiers" (written just a year before Trials), in which Rowson boldly proclaims that women "were born for universal sway," provides an interesting counterpoint to Trials, raising questions as to what extent Meriel is ever able to achieve agency in the patriarchal world in which her adventures take place. An excerpt from William Cobbett's "A Kick for a Bite," a misogynist attack on Rowson and her work, further highlights the way questions about gender relations and women's role in public life shaped Rowson's writing. Editions like this one make it possible for students and general readers to see for themselves the fuller...}, number={2}, journal={EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE}, author={Baker, Anne}, year={2019}, pages={601–602} }
 @article{baker_2016, title={Abolitionist Geographies}, volume={52}, ISSN={["0305-7488"]}, DOI={10.1016/j.jhg.2015.07.004}, abstractNote={Memorialising lives, deaths and events in landscapes can be authorised, official and highly regulated, or spontaneous, unsanctioned and anti-authoritarian. Interpreting and connecting two sites spanning the Pacific Ocean, this paper explores the inscribed and affective landscapes of Angel Island, San Francisco, and North Head, Sydney. Both sites encompass multivalent histories of defence, quarantine, immigration and leisure. Both also host a continuum of mark-making practices, from informal graffiti to monuments aspiring to direct national narratives. Elaborating the rich and complex layering of histories at each site, we trace the semiotic and emotive circuits marked by their endorsed and vernacular inscriptions. In particular, we question the work done when individual or even surreptitious texts are appropriated – or marketed – within formal narratives of inclusiveness, reverence and homogeneous nationalism. Drawing upon scholarship from archaeology, history, geography and heritage studies, this analysis argues that formalised commemoration never escapes the potential for counter-readings – that authority and authorship never entirely coincide.}, journal={JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY}, author={Baker, Anne}, year={2016}, month={Apr}, pages={113–114} }
 @article{baker_2016, title={Mapping Agency: Global Geography and Naturalism in Willa Cather’s One of Ours}, volume={2}, ISSN={2373-566X 2373-5678}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2016.1167614}, DOI={10.1080/2373566X.2016.1167614}, abstractNote={In One of Ours ([1922] 1991), Willa Cather puts a distinctive spin on naturalist fiction by having geography function as a major component of her characters’ powerlessness and at the same time having maps function as a means of self-determination. Cather’s literary maps represent the way that growing U.S. engagement with the world in the early twentieth century enables the protagonist, Claude, to develop a sense of purpose and agency and to recuperate his tarnished masculinity. Ultimately, One of Ours is best seen as Cather’s alternative to the isolationist visual rhetoric of Mercator projection maps, which were extremely popular in the early twentieth-century United States, particularly in schools.}, number={1}, journal={GeoHumanities}, publisher={Informa UK Limited}, author={Baker, Anne}, year={2016}, month={Jan}, pages={119–131} }
 @article{baker_2010, title={"Terrible women" gender, platonism, and christianity in Willa Cather's The Professor's House}, volume={45}, number={3}, journal={Western American Literature}, author={Baker, A.}, year={2010}, pages={253–272} }
 @book{baker_2006, title={Heartless immensity: Literature, culture, and geography in antebellum America}, ISBN={0472115707}, publisher={Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press}, author={Baker, A.}, year={2006} }
 @misc{baker_2002, title={Dream a little: Land and social justice in modern America}, volume={31}, number={2}, journal={Clio (Kenosha, Wis.)}, author={Baker, A.}, year={2002}, pages={221–227} }
 @article{baker_2001, title={Omeros}, journal={Encyclopedia of American poetry: The twentieth century}, publisher={Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn}, author={Baker, A.}, year={2001} }