Transatlantic spectacles of race : the tragic mulatta and the tragic muse / Kimberly Snyder Manganelli.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Manganelli, Kimberly Snyder.

Series:

American literatures initiative.

American literatures initiative

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Multiracial women in literature.

Tragic, The, in literature.

Race in literature.

Physical Description:

xi, 224 pages ; 18 cm.

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, [2012]

Summary:

The Tragic Mulatta was a stock figure in nineteenth-century American literature, an attractive mixed-race woman who became a casualty of the color line. The Tragic Muse was an equally familiar figure in Victorian British culture, an exotic and alluring Jewish actress whose profession placed her alongside the "fallen woman."

In Transatlantic Spectacles of Race, Kimberly Snyder Manganelli argues that the Tragic Mulatta and Tragic Muse, who have heretofore been read separately, must be understood as two sides of the same phenomenon. In both cases, the eroticized and racialized female body is put on public display as a highly enticing commodity in the nineteenth-century marketplace. Tracing these figures through American, British, and French literature and culture, Manganelli constructs a host of surprising literary genealogies, from Zelica to Daniel Deronda, from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Lady Audley's Secret. Bringing together an impressive array of cultural texts that includes novels, melodramas, travel narratives, diaries, and illustrations, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race reveals the value of transcending literary, national, and racial boundaries. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: 'I thought that to seem was to be': spectacles of race in the nineteenth-century transatlantic imaginary

'Stamped and molded by pleasure': the transnational mulatta in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue

'Fascinating allurements of gold': New Orleans's 'copper-colored nymphs' and the tragic mulatta

'Oh heavens! what am I?': the tragic mulatta as sensation heroine

'I wonder what market he means that daughter for': the beautiful jewess and the tragic muse

'After all, living is but to play a part': the tragic mulatta plays the tragic muse

Conclusion: 'I know what I am': race and the triumphant 'new woman'.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780813549873

0813549876

9780813549880

0813549884

9780813549910

0813549914

OCLC:

727704438