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"This groundbreaking collection of essays by a group of extraordinary scholars and critics treats a wide range of key American writers and presents the most important arguments of the last twenty years on gender and sexuality and on class, race, and nationalism in American cultural expression. The book demonstrates clearly how far we have come, what we have learned, and what is at stake today in our reading, in the classroom, and in our lives. It asks, finally, if we will accept the continuation of separate spheres or if we will keep striving to resist them. A major achievement!"--Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
List of contents
Preface
Introduction / Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher
Part 1: Canons
Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History / Linda K. Kerber
“My Sister! My Sister!”: The Rhetoric of Catherine Sedgwick’s
Hope Leslie / Judith Fetterley
Herman Melville, Wife Beating, and the Written Page / Elizabeth Renker
Contradictory Impulses: Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton, Resistance Theory, and the Politics of Chicano/a Studies / Jose F. Aranda Jr.
Sex, Class, and “Category Crisis”: Reading Jewett’s Transitivity / Marjorie Pryse
Part 2: Domesticity Undone: Case Studies
Manifest Domesticity / Amy Kaplan
Passing through the Closet in Pauline E. Hopkins’s
Contending Forces / Siobhan Somerville
Constructing the Black Masculine: Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, and the Sublimits of African American Autobiography / Maurice Wallace
Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres / You-me Park and Gayle Wald
Part 3: Public Sentiment
Poor Eliza / Lauren Berlant
Representative/Democracy: Presidents, Democratic Management, and the Unfinished Business of Male Sentimentalism / Dana D. Nelson
Fathers, Sons, Sentimentality, and the Color Line: The Not-Quite-Separate Spheres of W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Waldo Emerson / Ryan Schneider
“Few of Our Seeds Ever Came Up at All”: A Dialogue on Hawthorne, Delany, and the Work of Affect in Visionary Utopias / Christopher Newfield and Melissa Solomon
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index
About the author
Cathy N. Davidson is Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English at Duke University.
Jessamyn Hatcher is a faculty member in the General Studies Program at New York University.
Summary
Challenges the limitations of thinking about nineteenth-century American culture within the narrow rubric of "male public" and "female private" spheres. This title examines the ways that the separate spheres binary has malingered in unexamined ways in feminist criticism, American literary studies, and debates on the public sphere.
