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"This superb collection demonstrates the exciting new work being done in American literary history and criticism. Its many wide-ranging, richly detailed contributions are certain to shape and extend cultural and political debates about race, class, gender, and American nationhood. "Subjects and Citizens" is among the best books of critical and cultural studies I have read."--William E. Cain, Wellesley College
List of contents
Introduction / Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson 1
Part I.
Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions: Notes Toward a New Literary History of the American Frontiers / Annette Kolodny 9
Oroonoko's Gendered Economies of Honor/Horror: Reframing Colonial Discourses Studies in the Americas / Stephanie Athey and Daniel Cooper Alarcón 27
Race and Sensibility in the Early Republic: Ann Eliza Bleecker and Sarah Wentworth Morton 57
Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire, and New Historicism / Lora Romero 87
Part II.
Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves / Joan Dayan 109
Critiques from Within: Antebellum Projects of Resistance / Maggie Sale 145
Radical Configurations of History in the Era of American Slavery / Russ Castronovo 169
White Slaves: The Mulatto Hero in Antebellum Fiction / Nancy Bentley 195
Part III.
Masculinity and Self-Performance in the
Life of Black Hawk / Timothy Sweet 219
Constructing the Black Masculine: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and the Sublimits of African American Autobiography / Maurice Wallace 245
Mark Twain and the Diseases of the Jews / Sander L. Gilman 271
Warring Fictions
: Iola Leroy and the Color of Gender / Elizabeth Young 293
"Alien Hands": Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race / Michele A. Birnbaum 319
Part IV.
"The Direction of the Howling": Nationalism and the Color Line in
Absalom, Absalom! / Barbara Ladd 345
Border Subjects and Transnational Sites: Américo Paredes's The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories / Ramón Saldívar 373
Remodeling the Model Home in
Uncle Tom's Cabin and
Beloved / Lori Askeland 395
A Zuni Racounteur Dons the Junco Shirt: Gender and Narrative Style in the Story of Coyote and Junco / Siobhan Senier 417
"We Murder Who We Were":
Jasmine and the Violence of Identity / Kristen-Carter Sanborn 433
The Queen of American Goes to Washington City: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill / Lauren Berland 455
The Body Public / Karla F. C. Holloway 481
Index 497
About the author
Michael Moon is Associate Professor of English at Duke University and Associate Editor of American Literature. He is the author of Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in "Leaves of Grass."
Cathy N. Davidson is Professor of English at Duke University and Editor of American Literature. She is the author of numerous books, including Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America.
