Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United StatesUnlike studies of nineteenth-century culture that perpetuate a dichotomy of a public, male world set against a private, female world, Lora Romero's Home Fronts 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 middle-class 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 based on the idea that "culture" has the capacity to either free or enslave. Through readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria Stewart, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Romero shows how the politics of culture reside in local formulations rather than in essential and ineluctable political structures. |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
abolitionism abolitionist aesthetics African American African American women Alcott American Renaissance analysis Anglo-American antebellum antebellum period argue asserts authority Benedict Anderson binarism bio-politics black nationalism black nationalist body Boston canon Catharine Catharine Beecher century chapter Civil claims classic contemporary Cooper critics critique defamiliarization difference Dimmesdale discourse domestic fiction domestic ideology domestic woman domesticity's Douglass economy Essays Eva's expression female education feminine feminist feminization Foucauldian Foucault free blacks gender Harriet Beecher Stowe Hawk-eye Hawthorne's Hester History of Sexuality homosocial housekeeping hysteria imagine Indian influence interpretation labor literary male writers Maria masculine masculinist mass culture Michel Foucault middle-class women modern Mohicans moral narrative narrator Nathaniel Hawthorne nineteenth nineteenth-century novel novelist opposition Oxford University Press physical power and resistance power relations race radical reading represents romance Scarlet Letter sentimental slave slavery social society sphere Stewart Stowe's suggests Sundquist texts ticity tion tradition Uncas Uncle Tom's Cabin womanhood womanist women writers writes