Gender in American Literature and Culture

This book illustrates how rigid ideas about gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States.

Jean M. Lutes (Edited by), Jennifer Travis (Edited by)

9781108477536, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 April 2021

390 pages
23.4 x 15.7 x 2.5 cm, 0.66 kg

'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

Gender in American Literature and Culture introduces readers to key developments in gender studies and American literary criticism. It offers nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present and moves 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 to a sense of 21st century cultural and political crisis, it illuminates the literary histories and cultural imaginaries that have set the stage for urgent contemporary debates.

Acknowledgements
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.

Subject Areas: Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Violence in society [JFFE], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA]