Race mixture in nineteenth-century U.S. and Spanish American fictions
Subtitle: gender, culture, and nation building
By: Debra J. Rosenthal.
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 182
Subjects: American fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Miscegenation in literature; Spanish-American fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Literature, Comparative -- American and Spanish American; Literature, Comparative -- Spanish American and American; Racially mixed people in literature; Race relations in literature; Slavery in literature; Racism in literature; Race in literature
Description: Publisher description -- [Debra J.] Rosenthal argues that many literary representations of intimacy or sex took on political dimensions, whether advocating assimilation or miscegenation or defending the status quo. She also examines the degree to which novelists reacted to beliefs about skin differences, blood taboos, incest, desire, or inheritance laws. Rosenthal discusses U.S. authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Lydia Maria Child as well as contemporary novelists from Cuba, Peru, and Ecuador, such as Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and Juan Leon Mera. With her multinational approach, Rosenthal explores the significance of racial hybridity to national and literary identity and participates in the wider scholarly effort to broaden critical discussions about America to include the Americas.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [157]-177) and index.
Table of contents: title: Race mixture and the representation of Indians in the United States and the Andes; title: Temperance and miscegenation in Whitman's Franklin Evans; title: Cuban slave fiction : race mixture in Sab; title: Floral counterdiscourse : miscegenation, ecofeminism, and hybridity in Lydia Maria Child's Romance of the republic; title: The white blackbird : miscegenation, genre, and the tragic mulatta in Howells, Harper, and The babes of romance.