عنوان

Domestic allegories of political desire :

0195073894

9780195073898

b534533

Domestic allegories of political desire :

[Book]

the Black heroine's text at the turn of the century /

Claudia Tate

New York :

Oxford University Press,

1992

x, 302 pages :

illustrations ;

25 cm

Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-290) and index

Maternal discourses as antebellum social protest -- Legacies of Intersecting cultural conventions -- To vote and to marry: locating a gendered and historicized model of interpretation -- Allegories of gender and class as discourses of political desire -- Sexual discourses of political reform of the post-reconstruction era -- Revising the patriarchal texts of husband and wife in real and fictive words -- From domestic happiness to racial despair -- Domestic tragedy as racial protest

0

Why did African-American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the nineteenth century - a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. In this study, Tate explores this apparent paradox through an examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is more than a literary study; it is also a social and intellectual history - a cultural critique of a period that historian Rayford W. Logan called "the Dark Ages of recent American history." Against a rich contextual framework, extending from abolitionist protest to the Black Aesthetic, Tate argues that the idealized marriage plot in these novels does not merely depict the heroine's happiness and economic prosperity. Instead, that plot encodes a resonant cultural narrative - a domestic allegory - about the political ambitions of an emancipated people. Once this domestic allegory of political desire is unmasked, it can be seen as a significant discourse of the post-Reconstruction era for representing African Americans' collective dreams about freedom and for reconstructing those contested dreams into fictive consummations of civil liberty. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is cultural criticism, cutting across the traditional disciplines of history, sociology, literature, and ethnology. By examining lost works, this book recovers the domestic heroine as a signifier of citizenship for African Americans, and domesticity as a discourse of black political agency. With this important work, Tate joins the ranks of leading scholars of African-American culture. It is essential reading for those interested in the intersection of race, gender, and class in American, African-American, and women's studies

African American women in literature

African American women-- Intellectual life

Allegory

American fiction-- African American authors-- History and criticism

American fiction-- Women authors-- History and criticism

Desire in literature

Domestic fiction, American-- History and criticism

Heroines in literature

Marriage in literature

Politics and literature-- United States

Women and literature-- United States

Allégorie

Désir dans la littérature

Écrits de femmes américains - Histoire et critique

Héroïnes dans la littérature

Mariage dans la littérature

Noires américaines - Vie intellectuelle

Noires américaines dans la littérature

Politique et littérature - États-Unis

Roman américain - Auteurs noirs américains - Histoire et critique

Roman américain - Histoire et critique

Roman familial américain - Histoire et critique

s1an

Tate, Claudia

20160712054458.0

[Book]

Y