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This book studies male activists in American feminism from the 1830s to the late 19th century, using archival work on personal papers as well as public sources to demonstrate their diverse and often contradictory advocacy of women’s rights, as important but also cumbersome allies. Focussing mainly on nine men—William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, James Mott, Frederick Douglass, Henry B. Blackwell, Stephen S. Foster, Henry Ward Beecher, Robert Purvis, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the book demonstrates how their interactions influenced debates within and outside the movement, marriages and friendships as well as the evolution of (self-)definitions of masculinity throughout the 19th century. Re-evaluating the historical evolution of feminisms as movements for and by women, as well as the meanings of identity politics before and after the Civil War, this is a crucial text for the history of both American feminisms and American politics and society. This is an important scholarly intervention that would be of interest to scholars in the fields of gender history, women’s history, gender studies and modern American history.
This book reveals a new history of the imagination told through its engagement with the body. Even as they denounced the imagination’s potential for inviting luxury, vice, and corruption, American audiences avidly consumed a transatlantic visual culture of touring paintings, dioramas, gift books, and theatrical performances that pictured a preindustrial—and largely imaginary—European past. By examining the visual, material, and rhetorical strategies artists like Washington Allston, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, and others used to navigate this treacherous ground, Catherine Holochwost uncovers a hidden tension in antebellum aesthetics. The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, literary and cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, and media studies.
The rising visibility of interracial couples calls for increased attention to the overlapping of culture and race, in safe spaces centered on small-group dynamics, or in public spaces where peoples of African descent are under the public gaze. This comparative study seeks to de-center the U.S-centered viewpoint common to much of the literature on black/white relations. Based on nine years of fieldwork in the American South and in France, Coquet shows many unexpected parallels between the two societies. Gendered perceptions of cultural authenticity and sexual ethics are a guiding thread, being inseparable from the historical and political contingencies (re-)defining acceptable forms of dating, marrying, and parenting among cis-heterosexual couples in both societies. Her account emphasizes resilience and agency as couples seek to protect themselves and their children, while their extended or symbolic kinship networks help white partners acknowledge the existence of racial privilege.
Drawing on comparative literary studies, postcolonial book history, and multiple, literary, and alternative modernities, this collection approaches the study of alternative literary modernities from the perspective ofcomparative print culture. The term comparative print culture designates a wide range of scholarly practices that discover, examine, document, and/or historicize various printed materials and their reproduction, circulation, and uses across genres, languages, media, and technologies, all within a comparative orientation. This book explores alternative literary modernities mostly by highlighting the distinct ways in which literary and cultural print modernities outside Europe evince the repurposing of European systems and cultures of print and further deconstruct their perceived universality.
The history of racism in America is also the history of ordinary Black Americans who accomplished extraordinary things in their pursuit of freedom. Faced with oppression throughout their journey, they built vibrant communities and lived purposeful lives. Pieces of Freedom: The Emancipation Sculptures of Edmonia Lewis and Meta Warrick Fuller brings that history to life by analyzing the first fifty years of Black freedom through the emancipation sculptures of two nineteenth-century African American sculptors, Mary Edmonia Lewis (1844–1909) and Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968). Lewis's and Fuller’s sculptures—and their visual narrative of a people’s strength and humanity in the face of...
Publication is an act of power. It brings a piece of writing to the public and identifies its author as a person with an intellect and a voice that matters. Because nineteenth-century Black Americans knew that publication could empower them, and because they faced numerous challenges getting their writing into print or the literary market, many published their own books and pamphlets in order to garner social, political, or economic rewards. In doing so, these authors nurtured a tradition of creativity and critique that has remained largely hidden from view. Bryan Sinche surveys the hidden history of African American self-publication and offers new ways to understand the significance of publication as a creative, reformist, and remunerative project. Full of surprising turns, Sinche’s study is not simply a look at genre or a movement; it is a fundamental reassessment of how print culture allowed Black ideas and stories to be disseminated to a wider reading public and enabled authors to retain financial and editorial control over their own narratives.
As recent years have witnessed a strong interest in the cultural representation of the culinary, ranging from analyses of food representation in film and literature to cultural readings of recipes, menus, national cuisines and celebrity chefs, the study of food narratives amidst contemporary consumer culture has become increasingly more important. This book seeks to respond to the challenge by presenting a series of case studies dealing with the representation of food and the culinary in a variety of cultural texts including post-colonial and popular fiction, women’s magazines and food writing. The contributors to the first part of the volume explore the various functions of food in post-c...