19th century america
19th century american society
A01=Gillian Brown
abolitionism
agoraphobia
american architecture
american cultural history
american culture
american family life
american history
american individualism
american literature
Author_Gillian Brown
Category=JBSF
Category=JMS
consumerism
cultural historians
cultural studies
domestic life
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
feminine identity
feminism
gender and sexuality
gender roles
gender studies
hysteria
lit crit
literary criticism
literary theory
marriage and parenting
motherhood
race studies
uncle toms cabin
womens work
Product details
- ISBN 9780520080997
- Weight: 363g
- Publication Date: 30 Sep 1992
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Gillian Brown's book probes the key relationship between domestic ideology and formulations of the self in nineteenth-century America. Arguing that domesticity institutes gender, class, and racial distinctions that govern masculine as well as feminine identity, Brown brilliantly alters, for literary critics, feminists, and cultural historians, the critical perspective from which nineteenth-century American literature and culture have been viewed. In this study of the domestic constitution of individualism, Brown traces how the values of interiority, order, privacy, and enclosure associated with the American home come to define selfhood in general. By analyzing writings by Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, Fern, and Gilman, and by examining other contemporary cultural modes--abolitionism, consumerism, architecture, interior decorating, motherhood, mesmerism, hysteria, and agoraphobia--she reconfigures the parameters of both domesticity and the patterns of self it fashions. Unfolding a representational history of the domestic, Brown's work offers striking new readings of the literary texts as well as of the cultural contexts that they embody.
Gillian Brown is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah.
