Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and CultureOxford University Press, 22 dec 1994 - 288 pagina's The figure of the mother in literature and the arts has been the subject of much recent critical attention. Whereas many studies have focused on women writers and the maternal, Laura Doyle significantly broadens the field by tracing the racial logic internal to Western representations of maternality at least since Romanticism. She formulates a theory of "racial patriarchy" in which the circumscription of reproduction within racial borders engenders what she calls the "race mother" in literary and cultural narratives. Pairing literary movements not often considered together--Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance--Doyle reveals that this figure haunts the openings of diverse modern novels and initiates their experimental narrative trajectories. Figures such as the slave mother in Invisible Man, Lena Grove in Light in August, Mrs. Dedalus in Ulysses, and Sethe in Beloved, Doyle shows, embody racial, sexual, and metaphysical anxieties which modern authors expose reconfigure, and attempt to surpass. Making use of heterogeneous materials, including kinship studies, phenomenology, and histories of slavery, Bordering on the Body traces the symbolic operations of the "race mother" from Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology to eugenics and twentieth-century fiction. A breakthrough in race and gender theory, a racial reconfiguration of modernism, and a reinterpretation of discourses of nature since Romanticism, the book will engage a wide spectrum of readers in literary and cultural studies. |
Inhoudsopgave
Introduction | 3 |
Eugenics Motherhood and Racial Patriarchy | 10 |
Scott and Wordsworth | 35 |
Science Phenomenology and Narrative | 54 |
LateRomantic Narrative in Cane | 81 |
LateRomantic Narrative in Ulysses | 110 |
Melymbrosia and To the Lighthouse | 139 |
Overige edities - Alles bekijken
Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture Laura Doyle,Laura Anne Doyle Gedeeltelijke weergave - 1994 |
Veelvoorkomende woorden en zinsdelen
become begins Beloved Bloom bodily body boundaries Cane chapter characters claim considered create critics cultural daughter desire difference discourse dominant Ellison's embodiment especially eugenics expression eyes fact father feels female finally force future gender gives hands human intercorporeal invisible Joyce kinship labor language leaves Lily living male master material means men's metaphysical mind Morrison mother figure move mythologies narrative narrator nature novel objects past patriarchy Paul physical political position practice presence protagonist question Quoted race racial racial-patriarchal Ramsay Ramsay's recalls references relation rhetoric role Romantic scene scientific seems sense serves Sethe sexual slave slavery social song space speak speech Stephen story structure studies substitution suggests things thought tradition tree turn University Press voice woman women Woolf Wordsworth writing York