In Purple Pleasures: Highly Wrought Fiction by Nineteenth- Century Women Writers, Assistant Professor Dorothy (Dorri) Beam uses largely unstudied but once widely popular writing by women to disrupt traditional scholarly categories of gender and genre in antebellum American literature. Drawing on the variety of discursive fields in which women participated–flower language, mesmerist science, spiritualism, homeopathic medicine, debates over free love, and feminism of the Margaret Fuller brand– Beam writes an account of the cultural politics of the highly wrought novel that transcends the domestic paradigm. By contrast, she argues, her work recharts the imaginative life of both black and white women and demonstrates that aesthetic experiment, fantasy, adventure, and sex were the province of women as well as men in nineteenth-century America.