Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century (New World Studies)
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: Oct 07, 2013
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780813934884
Description: As in many literatures of the New World grappling with issues of slavery and freedom, stories of racial insurrection frequently coincided with stories of cross-racial romance in nineteenth-century U.S. print culture. Colleen O'Brien explores how authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Livermore, and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda imagined the expansion of race and gender-based rights as a hemispheric affair, drawing together the United States with Africa, Cuba, and other parts of the Caribbean. Placing less familiar women writers in conversation with their more famous contemporaries--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Maria Child-O'Brien traces the transnational progress of freedom through the antebellum cultural fascination with cross-racial relationships and insurrections. Her book mines a variety of sources--fiction, political rhetoric, popular journalism, race science, and biblical treatises--to reveal a common concern: a future in which romance and rebellion engender radical social and political transformation. -- Publisher website.