The Yellow Wallpaper

Based on the 1892 New England Magazine text, this teaching edition of The Yellow Wallpaper includes a generous selection of historical materials. The documents are organized into thematic units and features nineteenth-century advice manuals for young women and mothers; medical texts discussing the nature of women's sexuality; social reform literature concerning women's rights, the working classes, and immigration; and excerpts from periodicals, diaries, and writers' notebooks that give students a sense of the changing literary scene that Gilman entered. Editorial features designed to help students read the novel in light of the documents include a general introduction providing historical and cultural background, a chronology o Hawthorne's life and times, an introduction to each thematic group of documents, headnotes, extensive annotations, a generous selection of illustrations, and a selected bibliography.