Reading Sideways - The Queer Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction

Reading Sideways explores the role various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. Each chapter takes a different art form as its object: sculpture, portraiture, homecraft, and opera, which appear in the major works of the period central to questions of gender, race, and sexuality, including those by Henry James, Davis, Willa Cather, Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman.

List of contents

List of Illustrations | vii

Introduction | 1

1. Strange Beauty | 15

2. Small Collectivity and the Low Arts | 43

3. The Impossible Art Object of Desire | 75

4. Willa Cather and W. E. B. Du Bois Go to the Opera | 112

Part One: A Continuous Repetition of Sound | 116

Part Two: Endless Melody | 138

Conclusion | 159

Acknowledgments | 163

Notes | 167

Index | 187

About the author

Dana Seitler

Product details

• Authors: Dana Seitler
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.07.2019
• EAN: 9780823282623
• ISBN: 978-0-8232-8262-3
• No. of pages: 208
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Literaturtheorie, Kunsttheorie, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies, LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, ART / Criticism & Theory, Literature - Classics / Criticism