No More Separate Spheres!

Inderpal Grewal

Description

No More Separate Spheres! challenges the limitations of thinking about American literature and culture within the narrow rubric of "male public" and "female private" spheres from the founders to the present. With provocative essays by an array of cutting-edge critics with diverse viewpoints, this collection examines the ways that the separate spheres binary has malingered unexamined in feminist criticism, American literary studies, and debates on the public sphere. It exemplifies new ways of analyzing gender, breaks through old paradigms, and offers a primer on feminist thinking for the twenty-first century.Using American literary studies as a way to talk about changing categories of analysis, these essays discuss the work of such major authors as Catharine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Catharine Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cynthia Kadohata, Chang Rae-Lee, and Samuel Delany. No More Separate Spheres! shows scholars and students different ways that gender can be approached and incorporated into literary interpretations. Feisty and provocative, it provides a forceful analysis of the limititations of any theory of gender that applies only to women, and urges suspicion of any argument that posits "woman" as a universal or uniform category.By bringing together essays from the influential special issue of American Literature of the same name, a number of classic essays, and several new pieces commissioned for this volume, No More Separate Spheres! will be an ideal teaching tool, providing a key supplementary text in the American literature classroom.Contributors. Jose F. Aranda, Lauren Berlant, Cathy N. Davidson, Judith Fetterley, Jessamyn Hatcher, Amy Kaplan, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, You-me Park, Marjorie Pryse, Elizabeth Renker, Ryan Schneider, Melissa Solomon, Siobhan Somerville, Gayle Wald , Maurice Wallace

Sujets

• USA
• Inglés estadounidense
• American English
• États-Unis
• Gender studies

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 10 mai 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822383437
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

NO MORE SEPARATE SPHERES!

NEXT WAVE: WOMEN’S STUDIES BEYOND THE DISCIPLINES

A series edited by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, & Robyn Wiegman

NO MORE

H H H A NEXT WAVE AMERICAN STUDIES READER

SEPARATE SPHERES!

EDITED BY CATHY N. DAVIDSON AND JESSAMYN HATCHER

Duke University Press H Durham and London H 

©    All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Carter & Cone Galliard by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For our teachers and our students

CONTENTS

Preface, 

Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher Introduction, 

PART 1: CANONS

Linda K. KerberSeparate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History, 

Judith Fetterley‘‘My Sister! My Sister!’’: The Rhetoric of Catharine Sedgwick’sHope Leslie,

Elizabeth RenkerHerman Melville, Wife Beating, and the Written Page, 

José F. Aranda Jr.Contradictory Impulses: María Ampara Ruiz de Burton, Resistance Theory, and the Politics of Chicano/a Studies, 

Marjorie PryseSex, Class, and ‘‘Category Crisis’’: Reading Jewett’s Transitivity, 

PART 2: DOMESTICITY UNDONE: CASE STUDIES

Amy KaplanManifest Domesticity, 

Siobhan SomervillePassing through the Closet in Pauline E. Hopkins’sContending Forces,

Maurice WallaceConstructing the Black Masculine: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and the Sublimits of African American Autobiography, 

You-me Park and Gayle WaldNative Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres, 

PART 3: PUBLIC SENTIMENT

Lauren BerlantPoor Eliza, 

Dana D. NelsonRepresentative/Democracy: Presidents, Democratic Management, and the Unfinished Business of Male Sentimentalism, 

Ryan SchneiderFathers, Sons, Sentimentality, and the Color Line: The Not-Quite-Separate Spheres of W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 

Christopher Newfield and Melissa Solomon‘‘Few of Our Seeds Ever Came Up at All’’: A Dialogue on Hawthorne, Delany, and the Work of Affect in Visionary Utopias, 

Selected Bibliography,  Contributors,  Index, 

Preface

C AT H Y N . D AV I D S O N A N D J E S S A M Y N H AT C H E R

By bringing together several essays from the influential ‘‘No More Sepa- rate Spheres!’’ special issue ofAmerican Literature,plus a number of classic essays and three new pieces commissioned especially for this volume, we have created a book intended as a core text in undergraduate and graduate courses on American literature, women’s literature, feminist theory, or the public sphere. For undergraduates,No More Separate Spheres!is an intro- duction to a range of feminist criticism, beginning with our introduction that spells out relationships between women and men, femininity and mas- culinity, feminism, gender, sex, public and private culture, and the ideology of the separate spheres. Because individual essays treat a range of Ameri- can authors—including Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Beecher, Sarah Josepha Hale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, María Ampara Ruiz de Burton, Pauline Hopkins, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cynthia Kadohata, Chang-rae Lee, and Samuel Delany—this could also serve as a ‘‘case book’’ in an American litera- ture survey course. For graduate students,No More Separate Spheres!exem- plifies many different ways that gender can be approached and incorporated into literary interpretations and, conversely, shows how using gender as an explanatory rubric reveals new insights into texts, authors, literary history, and theory. For all—scholars or students—this book is designed to show how other factors (notably race, sexuality, class, nationalism, and affect) are essential to the gendered reading of American culture. This book is a collaborative effort in every way, and one equally rooted in