Research Catalog

Title

Race and time : American women's poetics from antislavery to racial modernity / by Janet Gray.

Author

Gray, Janet Sinclair, 1948-

Publication

Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, [2004], ©2004.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

viii, 324 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

"Race and Time urges our attention to women's poetry in considering the cultural history of race. Building on close readings of well-known and less familiar poets - including Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Sarah Louisa Forten, Hannah Flagg Gould, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sarah Piatt, Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert, Sarah Josepha Hale, Eliza Follen, and Mary Mapes Dodge - Janet Gray traces tensions in women's literary culture from the era of abolitionism to the rise of the Plantation tradition. She devotes a chapter to children's verse, arguing that racial stereotypes work as "nonsense" that masks conflicts in the construction of white childhood. A compilation of the poems cited, most of which are difficult to find elsewhere, is included as an appendix."--BOOK JACKET.

Subject

• African Americans in literature
• American poetry > 19th century > History and criticism
• American poetry > History and criticism
• Antislavery movements in literature
• Literature and history > United States > History > 19th century
• Race in literature
• Race relations in literature
• Slavery in literature
• Women and literature > United States > History > 19th century

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [293]-319) and index.

Contents

I. Introduction -- 1. Wrappings: A Methodological Introduction -- 2. Contesting the Pearl: Whiteness, Blackness, and the Possession of American Poetry -- II. Antebellum -- 3. "Skins May Differ": Women's Republicanism and the Poetics of Abolitionism -- 4. The Mummy Returns: Humor, Kinship, and the Bindings of Print -- III. Postbellum -- 5. Looking in the Glass: Sarah Piatt's Poetics of Play and Loss -- 6. We Women Radicals: Frances Harper's Poetics of Racial Formation -- 7. What One Is Not Was: Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert's Poetics of Self-Reconstruction -- 8. Critical Positions in Racial Modernity: An Approach to Teaching -- IV. Other Times: Childhood and Nonsense -- 9. The Containment of Childhood: Reproducing Consumption in American Children's Verse.

ISBN

0877458774 (alk. paper)

LCCN

2003060383

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries