Janet Gabler-Hover
Emeritus, Professor English- Education
Ph.D., Ohio State University, 1982
- Specializations
19th-Century American Literature
- Biography
Professor Gabler-Hover’s teaching and research interests are 19th -century American literature and feminist theory. Her first book Truth in American Fiction (1990) examined the influence of classical rhetoric (Hugh Blair, George Campbell) and modern rhetoric (Jacque Derrida’s debate against Plato’s Phaedrus) on Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Clemens, and Henry James. Her second book Dreaming Black/Writing White: Hagar in American Culture and Literature (2000) offers evidence that some 19th–century Anglo-American women writers appropriated Black female identity metaphorically for white female empowerment and at the cost of Black female identity, something answered directly by late 19th-century African American writer Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins in Hagar’s Daughter.
Gabler-Hover edited a special issue of American Periodicals in 2002 that combined her interest in periodical research with her mentoring of graduate students in her classroom and in the classrooms of colleagues teaching periodical literature. The issue included work by students and philosophies on how to teach periodical research.
Gabler-Hover co-edited American History Through Literature 1820-1870 (3 vols. Thomson/Scribner 2006) with her colleague Robert Sattelmeyer. These volumes include literary-historical essays by top scholars on works and social topics of the period.
- Publications
Books
American History through Literature 1820-70.3 Vols. Eds. Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert Sattelmeyer. New York: Thomson/Scribner’s 2006.Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001. SAMLA Book of the Year Award, Fall 2001. (Winner of the SAMLA Book of the Year Award 2000.)
Truth in American Fiction: The Legacy of Rhetorical Idealism. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.
Essays
“The Portrait of a Southern Lady in Woolson’s For the Major.” In Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011: 215-231.
“What’s Up With Feminism? Reviewing Plain and Sellers’ A History of Feminist Literary Criticism and the State of Feminism” South Atlantic Review 73:2 (Spring 2008): 130-155.
“Early American Literature” in American Literary Scholarship 2003. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. With Robert Sattelmeyer: 243-274.
“Teaching ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ through Feminist Literary Criticism,” Approaches to Teaching Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ and Herland. New York: Modern Language Association. hdbk and paper, 2003: 90-96.
“Periodical Research: Open Sesame,” in “Special Issue: Periodical Research in the American Classroom,” Ed. Janet Gabler-Hover in American Periodicals 12: 2002, 40-48.
“The North-South Reconciliation Theme and the ‘Shadow of the Negro’ in Century IllustratednMagazine” in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, eds. Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995: 239-56. hardback and paper.
“H. G. Wells and Henry James’s Two Ladies,” in The Critical Response to H. G. Wells, ed. William J. Scheick. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995: 145-164.
“The House of Mirth and Edith Wharton’s ‘Beyond!'” with Kathleen Plate, Philological Quarterly 72:3 Summer, 1993: 253-275.
“The Ethics of Determinism in Henry James’s ”In the Cage,'” Henry James Review 14:1 Fall 1992: 253-275.
“Man’s Fragile Tenure: Discontinuous Time and The Ethos of Temporality in Edward Bellamy’s Short Fiction,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer, 1990: 302-28.
“A Merely Enabling Mythology: A Review-Essay on Language in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction,” Texas Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2, Summer, 1989: 318-39.
“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Bostonians, and Henry Ward Beecher: Discourse on the Idealization of Suffering,” South Central Review, Vol. 5, no. 4, Winter, 1988: 42-52.
“Truth and Deception: The Basis for Judgment in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove,” Texas Studies, Summer, 1987: 169-186.
“The Critical Deconstruction of Henry James: A Review-Essay,” Texas Studies, Summer, 1987: 215-235.
“Sympathy not Empathy: The Intent of Narration in Huckleberry Finn,” The Journal of Narrative Technique, Winter, 1987: 67-75.
“James’s Rhetorical Arena: The Metaphor of Battle in The Bostonians,” Texas Studies, Fall, 1985: 270-283.
“The Narrator’s Script: James’s Complex Narration in The Bostonians, Journal of Narrative Technique, Spring, 1984: 94-109.
Other Edited Collections
American Periodicals: Special Issue: Periodical Research in the American Classroom 12: 2002, i-226. Guest Edited and contributions solicited by Janet Gabler-Hover. Issue 12:2002.