No More Separate Spheres

by Davidson, Cathy N.; Hatcher, Jessamyn; Grewal, Inderpal; Kaplan, Caren

• ISBN13: 9780822328780
• ISBN10: 082232878X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-04-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

No More Separate Spheres! challenges the limitations of thinking about nineteenth-century American culture within the narrow rubric of "male public" and "female private" spheres. 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 in unexamined ways in feminist criticism, American literary studies, and debates on the public sphere. It exemplifies other ways of reading and thinking about gender by including such factors as race, sexuality, class, region, and nationalism.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, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. DuBois, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton. No More Separate Spheres! shows scholars and students different ways that gender can be approached and incorporated into literary interpretations and, conversely, how using gender as an explanatory category reveals new insights into texts, authors, literary history, and theory.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, a key supplementary text in any American literature classroom. It breaks through old paradigms and offers a primer on feminist thinking for the twenty-first century.

Table of Contents

Preface	i
Introduction	7	(22)
Cathy N. Davidson
Jessamyn Hatcher
PART 1: CANONS
Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History	29	(38)
Linda K. Kerbe
``My Sister! My Sister!'': The Rhetoric of Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie	67	(26)
Judith Fetterley
Herman Melville, Wife Beating, and the Written Page	93	(28)
Elizabeth Renker
Contradictory Impulses: Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton, Resistance Theory, and the Politics of Chicano/a Studies	121	(28)
Jose F. Aranda Jr.
Sex, Class, and ``Category Crisis'': Reading Jewett's Transitivity	149	(34)
Marjorie Pryse
PART 2: DOMESTICITY UNDONE: CASE STUDIES
Manifest Domesticity	183	(26)
Amy Kaplan
Passing through the Closet in Pauline E. Hopkins's Contending Forces	209	(28)
Siobhan Somerville
Constructing the Black Masculine: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and the Sublimits of African American Autobiography	237	(26)
Maurice Wallace
Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres	263	(28)
You-me Park
Gayle Wald
PART 3: PUBLIC SENTIMENT
Poor Eliza	291	(34)
Lauren Berlant
Representative/ Democratic: Presidents, Democratic Management, and the Unfinished Business of Male Sentimentalism	325	(30)
Dana D. Nelson
Fathers, Sons, Sentimentality, and the Color Line: The Not-Quite-Separate Spheres of W E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Waldo Emerson	355	(22)
Ryan Schneider
``Few of Our Seeds Ever Came Up at All'': A Dialogue on Hawthorne, Delany, and the Work of Affect in Visionary Utopias	377	(32)
Christopher Newfield
Mellssa Solomon
Selected Bibliography	409	(14)
Contributors	423	(4)
Index	427