Home Fronts

by Romero, Lora; Pease, Donald E.

• ISBN13: 9780822320425
• ISBN10: 0822320428
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-11-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

Unlike studies of nineteenth-century culture that perpetuate a dichotomy of a public, male world set against a private, female world, Lora Romerors"sHome Frontsshows the many, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory cultural planes on which struggles for authority unfolded in antebellum America. Romero remaps the literary landscape of the last century by looking at the operations of domesticity on the frontier as well as within the middle-class home and by reconsidering such crucial (if sometimes unexpected) sites for the workings of domesticity as social reform movements, African-American activism, and homosocial high culture. In the process, she indicts theories of the nineteenth century based on binarisms and rigidity while challenging models of power and resistance based on the idea that "culture" has the capacity to either free or enslave. Through readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria Stewart, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Romero shows how the politics of culture reside in local formulations rather than in essential and ineluctable political structures.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Introduction	1	(10)
A Society Controlled by Women: An Overview	11	(24)
Vanishing Americans	35	(17)
James Fenimore Cooper
Black Nationalist Housekeeping	52	(18)
Maria W. Stewart
Bio-Political Resistance	70	(19)
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Homosocial Romance	89	(17)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Conclusion	106	(9)
Notes	115	(23)
Index	138