Bordering on the Body - The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture

Zusatztext A useful and important study....Will provide a radical rereading of modernist texts. Informationen zum Autor Laura Doyle teaches modern literature and culutral theory at Harvard University. An original and striking study of a rich variety of modernisms, working with discernment and elegance at the 'compounded' intersection of race, sexualities, and gender. Zusammenfassung Throughout literary history, the figure of the mother has been the subject of much critical attention. While traditional studies have focused on women writers and the maternal, Laura Anne Doyle pairs literary movements not often considered together--Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance--to show how the figure of the mother haunts modern novels from their very opening pages. Figures such as the slave mother in the Prologue to Invisible Man, Lena Grove in Light in August, and Sethe in Beloved, Doyle shows, form a tradition that marks the tip of a cultural iceberg, the peaking expression of a cultural matrix at once racial and sexual, literary and scientific. Exploding the assumed persona of the mother, Doyle formulates a theory of "racial patriarchy" in which the circumspection of reproduction within racial borders engenders what she calls the "race mother" figure in literary and cultural narratives. Making use of heterogeneous materials, ranging from kinship studies to histories of slavery, Bordering on the Body traces the symbolic operations of the "race mother" from Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology to eugenics and twentieth-century fiction. This newest title in the Race and American Culture series offers a breakthrough in race and gender theory, a racial reconfiguration of modernism, and a reinterpretation of discourses of nature since Romanticism.

Product details

• Authors: Doyle, Laura Doyle, Laura (Assistant Professor Doyle, Laura Anne Doyle
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.10.1994
• EAN: 9780195086553
• ISBN: 978-0-19-508655-3
• No. of pages: 284
• Series: Race and American Culture; Race and American Culture
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; USA, Anthropology, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, American English, United States of America, USA, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form