Philosophies of Sex

by Bergland, Renee; Williams, Gary

• ISBN13: 9780814211892
• ISBN10: 0814211895
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-11-30
• Publisher: Ohio State Univ Pr

Summary

Philosophies of Sex: Critical Essays onThe Hermaphrodite is the first collection of critical studies of Julia Ward Howe's long-secret novel that, since its initial publication in 2004, has caused a seismic shift in how we understand gender awareness and sexuality in antebellum America. Howe figures in the history of the nineteenth-century American literature primarily as a poet, most famous for having written the lyrics to "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Renée Bergland and Gary Williams have assembled a luminous array of essays by eminent scholars of the nineteenth-century American literature, providing fascinating-and widely differing-contexts in which to understand Howe's venture into territory altogether foreign to American writers in her day. An introduction by Bergland and Williams traces the (re)discovery of Howe's manuscript and the beginnings of commentary as word spread about this remarkable text. Mary Grant, an early reader, invokes the excitement and frontier spirit of women's history in the 1970s. Marianne Noble and Laura Saltz place the narrative within the frames of European and American Romanticism and of Howe's other writings. Betsy Klimasmith, Williams, Bethany Schneider, and Joyce Warren explore connections between Howe's novel and other ground-breaking nineteenth-century works on gender, sexuality, and relationship. Bergland and Suzanne Ashworth explore The Hermaphrodite's suggestive invocations of two other kinds of "texts": sculpture and theology.

Author Biography

Rene Bergland is Hazel Dick Leonard Professor of English and Gender/Cultural Studies at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts. Gary Williams is professor and chair of the department of English at the University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Foreword: Meeting the Hermaphrodite	p. 15
Indeterminate Sex and Text: The Manuscript Status of The Hermaphrodite	p. 23
From Self-Erasure to Self-Possession: The Development of Julia Ward Howe's Feminist Consciousness	p. 47
"Rather Both Than Neither": The Polarity of Gender in Howe's Hermaphrodite	p. 72
"Never the Half of Another": Figuring and Foreclosing Marriage in The Hermaphrodite	p. 93
Howe's Hermaphrodite and Alcott's "Mephistopheles": Unpublished Cross-Gender Thinking	p. 108
"The Cruelest Enemy of Beauty": Sand's Gabriel, HoweÆs Laurence	p. 120
The Consummate Hermaphrodite	p. 138
Cold Stone: Sex and Sculpture in The Hermaphrodite	p. 157
Spiritualized Bodies and Posthuman Possibilities: Technologies of Intimacy in The Hermaphrodite	p. 186
Unrealized: The Queer Time of The Hermaphrodite	p. 215
Afterword: Howe Now?	p. 242
Works Cited	p. 253
Contributors	p. 264
Index	p. 266
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