Title: Home fronts
First published: 1997
Description: Unlike studies of nineteenth-century culture that perpetuate a dichotomy of a public, male world set against a private, female world, Lora Romero's Home Front shows 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 middleclass 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 founded on the idea that "culture" has the capacity to either free or enslave. Through readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria W. Stewart, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Romero shows how the politics of culture reside in local formulations rather than in essential and ineluctable political structures.
Subjects: Historiography, Sex differences, Literature and society, History and criticism, Political and social views, Women and literature, Home, Domestic fiction, American, Authorship, American fiction, American Domestic fiction, History, United states, history, 19th century, United states, social conditions, Family, united states
Places: United States
People: Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), Maria W. Stewart (1803-1879), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: PS374.D57 R64 1997