Domestic allegories of political desire : the Black heroine's text at the turn of the century / Claudia Tate.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tate, Claudia.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Domestic fiction, American--History and criticism.

Domestic fiction, American.

American fiction--African American authors--History and criticism.

American fiction.

American fiction--Women authors--History and criticism.

Politics and literature--United States.

Politics and literature.

African American women--Intellectual life.

African American women.

African American women in literature.

Heroines in literature.

Marriage in literature.

Desire in literature.

Allegory.

Physical Description:

x, 302 p. : ill.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 1992.

Summary:

This study aims to uncover the political significance of black women's domestic fiction in the post-Reconstruction period. The author's cultural analysis draws upon a range of texts including works by Harriet Wilson, Pauline Hopkins, Katherine Tillman and Zora Neale.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Introduction: A Highway through the Wilderness of Post-Reconstruction

1. Maternal Discourses as Antebellum Social Protest

The Kitchen Politics of Abolitionism

Politicizing the Black Mother's Voice

2. Legacies of Intersecting Cultural Conventions

Antebellum Gender Constructions of the Black Female

Gentility, Color, and Social Mobility

The Pedagogy of Sentimental Literature

Male and Female Generic Narratives of Racial Protest

3. To Vote and to Marry: Locating a Gendered and Historicized Model of Interpretation

A Modern Paradigm: Antagonistic Discourses of Marriage and Freedom

Twentieth-Century Critical Imperatives

The Aesthetic of Race Literature

Interpretative Model: Domestic Desire as Political Discourse

4. Allegories of Gender and Class as Discourses of Political Desire

The Intended Readers of Black Women's Post-Reconstruction Domestic Novels

The Politics of Desire

Domestic Narrative as Racial Discourse

The Heroine as Agent of Racial Desire

5. Sexual Discourses of Political Reform of the Post-Reconstruction Era

(Black) Manhood and Womanhood as Racial and Political Signifiers of Citizenship

Literary Interventionism

The Domestic Heroine and Black Bourgeois Individuation

Centering the Heroine's Virtue

6. Revising the Patriarchal Texts of Husband and Wife in Real and Fictive Worlds

Gender Rites and the Higher Education of Black Women

Gender Rites and Fictive Texts

Love as a Strategy for Revising Spousal Roles

7. From Domestic Happiness to Racial Despair

The Heroine's Work

Black Heroines, the Racial Discourse, Formula Novels, and the Test of True Love

8. Domestic Tragedy as Racial Protest

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

R

S

T

V

W

Y.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. 281-290) and index.

Description based on metadata supplied by the publisher and other sources.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

019536080X

9780195360806

OCLC:

935260396