Family Money - Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Zusatztext this book is both vast and analytically detailed in scope. Informationen zum Autor Jeffory Clymer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky and the author of America's Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism and the Written Word (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Klappentext Combining nuanced literary interpretations with significant legal cases, Family Money reveals a shared preoccupation with the financial quandaries emerging from interracial sexuality in nineteenth-century America. At stake, Clymer shows, were the very notions of family and the long-term distribution of wealth in the United States. Zusammenfassung Family Money explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners, the household traumas of mixed-race slaves, post-Emancipation calls for reparations, and the economic fallout from anti-miscegenation marriage laws. Authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, to Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriadforms, often simultaneously-sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when), who could ownproperty (and when), and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together. Demonstrating that notions of race were entwined with economics well beyond the direct issue of slavery, Family Money reveals interracial sexuality to be a volatile mixture of emotion, economics, and law that had dramatic, long-term financial consequences.

Summary

Combining nuanced literary interpretations with significant legal cases, Family Money reveals a shared preoccupation with the financial quandaries emerging from interracial sexuality in nineteenth-century America. At stake, Clymer shows, were the very notions of family and the long-term distribution of wealth in the United States.

Product details

• Authors: Clymer, Jeffory Clymer, Clymer Jeffory A.
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.11.2012
• EAN: 9780199897704
• ISBN: 978-0-19-989770-4
• No. of pages: 224
• Series: Oxford Studies in American Literary History; Oxford Studies in American Lit
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, Ethnic Studies, HISTORY / Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies), SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, 18th century, c 1700 to c 1799, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Gender studies, gender groups, History of the Americas, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Black & Asian Studies, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Cultural & Ethnic Studies / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Gender Identity