The Gender of Freedom : Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere / Elizabeth Maddock Dillon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (328 p.)

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In a sweeping reassessment of early American literature, The Gender of Freedom explores the workings of the literary public sphere—from its colonial emergence through the antebellum flourishing of sentimentalism. Placing representations of and by women at the center rather than the margin of the public sphere, this book links modern forms of political identity to the seemingly private images of gender displayed prominently in the developing public sphere. The "fictions of liberalism" explored in this book are those of marriage and motherhood, sentimental domesticity, and heterosexual desire—narratives that structure the private realm upon which liberalism depends for its meaning and value. In a series of bold theoretical arguments and nuanced readings of literary texts, the author explores the political force of these private narratives with chapters on the Antinomian crisis in Puritan Massachusetts, early national models of gender and marriage in the works of Charles Brockden Brown and Hannah Webster Foster, infanticide narratives and nineteenth-century accounts of motherhood in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child, and "re-arranging" marriage in the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Gender of Freedom and Women in Public

1 Gender, Liberal Theory, and the Literary Public Sphere

2 Puritan Bodies and Transatlantic Texts

3 Contracting Marriage in the New Republic

4 Sociality and Sentiment

Coda: Queering Marriage-Emily Dickinson and the Poetics of Title

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 31. Jan 2022)

ISBN:

1-5036-1651-7

OCLC:

1294425597