Dr. Nicole L. Willey is currently Assistant Professor of English at Kent State University Tuscarawas in New Philadelphia, Ohio. She completed her Ph.D. in Nineteenth-Century American Literature at the University of Alabama.
2008 0-7734-5204-4 This work examines the male characters presented in each of the following works: Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855), Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). These sentimental women authors presented masculine ideals in their literature and have played an important role in the construction of gender in America.