Description
Book SynopsisGender in American Literature and Cultureintroduces readers to key developments in gender studies and American literary criticism.Itoffers nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present andmoves beyond inflexible categories of masculinity and femininity that have reinforced misleading assumptions about public and private spaces, domesticity, individualism, and community. The book also demonstrates how rigid inscriptions of gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States. Responding toa sense of 21st century cultural and political crisis, itilluminates the literary histories and cultural imaginaries that have set the stage for urgent contemporary debates.
Trade Review'Required reading for anyone seeking to understand the wide diversity of approaches to gender in American literature, this book is a welcome update for scholars of American studies and gender studies … Highly recommended.' D. E. Magill, Choice Magazine
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements; Introduction: Gender Criticism in the Age of Trump Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis; Part I. Intimacies: 1. The Price of Freedom: Racialized Female Desire in Early America Anna Mae Duane; 2. Post-Reproductive Female Sexuality and the Early American Novel Marion Rust; 3. The Effeminate Man in Nineteenth-Century America Travis Foster; 4. Rereading Puritan Masculinity through Trans Theory Ivy Schweitzer; 5. 'Unbounded Grief': Black Maternal Sorrow and the Literature of Slavery Shermaine M. Jones; 6. Rethinking Reproductive Freedom through Transpacific Narratives Yu-Fang Cho; 7. Slow Emergency: Life Writing, Dementia, Gender, and Care Rachel Adams; Part II. Aggressions: 8. Sexual Violence and Indigenous Women: Rereading the Archive of Catharine Brown (Cherokee) Theresa Strouth Gaul; 9. Intergenerational Memory and the Making of Indigenous Literary Kinships Susan Bernardin; 10. US Women Writers, Sexual Violence, and Narrative Resistance Catherine Keyser; 11. Gender, Violence, and Accountability in Contemporary Queer Latina Writing Lourdes Torres; 12. The Literature of Racial Uplift and White Feminist Failure Brigitte Fielder; 13. Black Male Studies and Contemporary African American Writing Seulghee Lee; 14. Representations of White Masculinity in Veteran-Authored Iraq War Fiction Hamilton Carroll; 15. What a Doctor Should Look Like: Queer Femme Erasure and the Politics of Dress in the Nineteenth Century Christine 'Xine' Yao; 16. Genderqueer: Literary and Gender Experimentation in Twentieth-Century American Literature Jaime Harker; 17. Fanfiction, Transformative Works, and Feminist Resistance in Digital Culture Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett; 18. Vulnerable States: Immigration and Gender in American Literature Sigrid Anderson; 19. The Mahjar: Arab Women's Literary Culture in America at the Early Twentieth Century Elizabeth Claire Saylor; 20. Disabled Women's Life Writing and the Problem with Recovery Clare Mullaney; 21. Feeling, Memory, and Peoplehood in Contemporary Native Women's Poetry Mark Rifkin.
