Domestic Allegories of Political Desire
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Why did African-American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the nineteenth century, during a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. This is the question at the center of Tate's examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is more than a literary study; it is also a social and intellectual history--a cultural critique of a period that historian Rayford W. Logan called "the Dark Ages of recent American history." Against a rich contextual framework, extending from abolitionist protest to the Black Aesthetic, Tate argues that the idealized marriage plot in these novels does not merely depict the heroine's happiness and economic prosperity. More importantly, that plot encodes a resonant cultural narrative--a domestic allegory--about the political ambitions of an emancipated people. Once this domestic allegory of political desire is unmasked in these novels, it can be seen as a significant discourse of the post-Reconstruction era for representing African-Americans' collective dreams about freedom and for reconstructing those contested dreams into consummations of civil liberty.Reviews
"A ground-breaking work....As a pioneering work, it is itself critical history."--Women's Review of Books
"Tate...offers profound insights into literature that is increasingly reaching wider audiences and enriching the canon."--Belles Lettres
"Tate has given us a treasure....Because of her familiarity with Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction historiography, and because of her sensititve reading of the materials she uses, Tate's book deserves an honored place in historical literature."--American Historical Review
"This fine study...is certain to remain the key work on its subject for the forseeable future."--American Studies
Product Details
312 pages; 7 halftones, 2 line drawings; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-510857-6ISBN10: 0-19-510857-4About the Author(s)
Claudia Tate is Professor of African-American and American Literatures at George Washington University. She is the author of the forthcoming Desire and the Rituals of Race (OUP, November 1996) and editor of The Works of Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman (OUP, 1991).
