Home Fronts - Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States

Unlike studies of nineteenth-century culture that perpetuate a dichotomy of a public, male world set against a private, female world, Lora Romero’s Home Fronts shows the many, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory cultural planes on which struggles for authority unfolded in antebellum America.
Romero remaps the literary landscape of the last century by looking at the operations of domesticity on the frontier as well as within the middle-class home and by reconsidering such crucial (if sometimes unexpected) sites for the workings of domesticity as social reform movements, African-American activism, and homosocial high culture. In the process, she indicts theories of the nineteenth century based on binarisms and rigidity while challenging models of power and resistance based on the idea that "culture" has the capacity to either free or enslave. Through readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria Stewart, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Romero shows how the politics of culture reside in local formulations rather than in essential and ineluctable political structures.

About the author

Lora Romero

Summary

Unlike studies of 19th-century culture that perpetuate a dichotomy of a public, male world set against a private, female world, this book shows the sometimes contradictory cultural planes on which struggles for authority unfolded in antebellum America. It also revises the terms of debate on 19th-century literature, history, and gender studies.

Product details

• Authors: Lora Romero, Romero, Lora Romero
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 29.10.1997
• EAN: 9780822320425
• ISBN: 978-0-8223-2042-5
• No. of pages: 160
• Dimensions: 153 mm x 236 mm x 13 mm
• Weight: 272 g
• Series: New Americanists; New Americanists
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories