front cover of Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature
Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature
Carole Mejia LaPerle
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021
This collection brings together critical race studies and affect theory to examine the emotional dimensions of race in early modern literature. 

Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature puts the fields of critical race studies and affect theory into dialogue. Doing so opens a new set of questions: What are the emotional experiences of racial formation and racist ideologies? How do feelings—through the physical senses, emotional passions, or sexual encounters—come to signify race? What is the affective register of anti-blackness that pervades canonical literature? How can these visceral forms of racism be resisted in discourse and in practice? By investigating how race feels, this book offers new ways of reading and interpreting literary traditions, religious differences, gendered experiences, class hierarchies, sexuality, and social identities. So far scholars have shaped the discussion of race in the early modern period by focusing on topics such as genealogy, language, economics, religion, skin color, and ethnicity. This book, however, offers something new: it considers racializing processes as visceral, affective experiences.
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Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America
The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer
Mark Whalan
University of Tennessee Press, 2007
Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America offers the first extended comparison between American writers Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) and Jean Toomer (1894-1967), examining their engagement with the ideas of “Young American” writers and critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, Paul Rosenfeld, and Waldo Frank. This distinctively modernist school was developing unique visions of how race, gender, and region would be transformed as America entered an age of mass consumerism.

Focusing on Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and Toomer’s Cane (1923), Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America brings Anderson and Toomer together in a way that allows for a thorough historical and social contextualization that is often missing from assessments of these two literary talents and of modernism as a whole. The book suggests how the gay subcultures of Chicago and the traumatic events of the Great War provoked Anderson’s anxieties over the future of male gender identity, anxieties that are reflected in Winesburg, Ohio. Mark Whalan discusses Anderson’s primitivistic attraction to African American communities and his ambivalent attitudes toward race, attitudes that were embedded in the changing cultural and gendered landscape of mass mechanical production.

The book next examines how Toomer aimed to broaden the racial basis of American cultural nationalism, often inspired by the same cultural critics who had influenced Anderson. He rejected the ethnographically based model of tapping the “buried cultures” of ethnic minorities developed by his mentor, Waldo Frank, and also parted with the “folk” aesthetic endorsed by intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. Instead, Toomer'’ monumental Cane turned to discourses of physical culture, machine technology, and illegitimacy as ways of conceiving of a new type of manhood that refashioned commonplace notions of racial identity.

Taken together, these discussions provide a fresh, interdisciplinary appraisal of the importance of race to “Young America,” suggest provocative new directions for scholarship, and give new insight into some of the most crucial texts of U.S. interracial modernism.


Mark Whalan is a senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of Exeter. He is the editor of The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924, and his articles have appeared in the Journal of American Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Studies in American Fiction, and Modern Fiction Studies.


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front cover of Reading Dido
Reading Dido
Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid
Marilynn Desmond
University of Minnesota Press, 1994

front cover of Reading the East India Company 1720-1840
Reading the East India Company 1720-1840
Colonial Currencies of Gender
Betty Joseph
University of Chicago Press, 2003
In Reading the East India Company, Betty Joseph offers an innovative account of how archives—and the practice of archiving—shaped colonial ideologies in Britain and British-controlled India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Drawing on the British East India Company's records as well as novels, memoirs, portraiture and guidebooks, Joseph shows how the company's economic and archival practices intersected to produce colonial "fictions" or "truth-effects" that strictly governed class and gender roles—in effect creating a "grammar of power" that kept the far-flung empire intact. And while women were often excluded from this archive, Joseph finds that we can still hear their voices at certain key historical junctures. Attending to these voices, Joseph illustrates how the writing of history belongs not only to the colonial project set forth by British men, but also to the agendas and mechanisms of agency—of colonized Indian, as well as European women. In the process, she makes a valuable and lasting contribution to gender studies, postcolonial theory, and the history of South Asia.
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Rebel Women
Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel
Jane Eldridge Miller
University of Chicago Press, 1996
With the rise of women's suffrage, challenges to marriage and divorce laws, and expanding opportunities for education and employment for women, the early years of the twentieth century were a time of social revolution. Examining British novels written in 1890-1914, Jane Eldridge Miller demonstrates how these social, legal, and economic changes rendered the traditional narratives of romantic desire and marital closure inadequate, forcing Edwardian novelists to counter the limitations and ideological implications of those narratives with innovative strategies. The original and provocative novels that resulted depict the experiences of modern women with unprecedented variety, specificity, and frankness. Rebel Women is a major re-evaluation of Edwardian fiction and a significant contribution to literary history and criticism.

"Miller's is the best account we have, not only of Edwardian women novelists, but of early 20th-century women novelists; the measure of her achievement is that the distinction no longer seems workable." —David Trotter, The London Review of Books

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front cover of Rewriting the Renaissance
Rewriting the Renaissance
The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe
Edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers
University of Chicago Press, 1986
Juxtaposing the insights of feminism with those of marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, this unique collection creates new common ground for women's studies and Renaissance studies. An outstanding array of scholars—literary critics, art critics, and historians—reexamines the role of women and their relations with men during the Renaissance. In the process, the contributors enrich the emerging languages of and about women, gender, and sexual difference.

Throughout, the essays focus on the structures of Renaissance patriarchy that organized power relations both in the state and in the family. They explore the major conequences of patriarchy for women—their marginalization and lack of identity and power—and the ways in which individual women or groups of women broke, or in some cases deliberately circumvented, the rules that defined them as a secondary sex. Topics covered include representations of women in literature and art, the actual work done by women both inside and outside of the home, and the writings of women themselves. In analyzing the rhetorical strategies that "marginalized" historical and fictional women, these essays counter scholarly and critical traditions that continue to exhibit patriarchal biases.
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