Product Description

Throughout literary history, the figure of the mother has been the subject of much critical attention. While traditional studies have focused on women writers and the maternal, Laura Anne Doyle pairs literary movements not often considered together--Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance--to show how the figure of the mother haunts modern novels from their very opening pages. Figures such as the slave mother in the Prologue to Invisible Man, Lena Grove in Light in August, and Sethe in Beloved, Doyle shows, form a tradition that marks the tip of a cultural iceberg, the peaking expression of a cultural matrix at once racial and sexual, literary and scientific. Exploding the assumed persona of the mother, Doyle formulates a theory of "racial patriarchy" in which the circumspection of reproduction within racial borders engenders what she calls the "race mother" figure in literary and cultural narratives. Making use of heterogeneous materials, ranging from kinship studies to histories of slavery, Bordering on the Body traces the symbolic operations of the "race mother" from Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology to eugenics and twentieth-century fiction. This newest title in the Race and American Culture series offers a breakthrough in race and gender theory, a racial reconfiguration of modernism, and a reinterpretation of discourses of nature since Romanticism.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1224031 in Books
• Published on: 1995-03-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
"A useful and important study....Will provide a radical rereading of modernist texts."--Choice
"Doyle's is an original and striking study of a rich variety of modernisms, working with discernment and elegance at the 'compounded' intersection of race, sexualities, and gender."--Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University
"Laura Doyle's book is a timely, readable, and exceedingly provocative analysis of the relation between matriarchal theories and racial politics. Her study of modernist and Harlem Renaissance fictions and the configurations of the racialized mother figure is astute, innovative new work. I admire this book for its scope and finely crafted arguments about the intersections of race and aesthetics."--Dale M. Bauer, University of Wisconsin
"Bordering on the Body criss-crosses the boundaries of the history of science, literary studies, cultural studies, feminism, and African-American studies to produce startlingly original readings of modern classics by Joyce, Woolf, Toomer, Ellison, and Morrison. Doyle's concept of 'racial patriarchy' brilliantly shows the co-dependence of racial and gender hierarchies, particularly as the figure of the 'racial mother' functions as cultural icon that both sustains and dismantles the interdependencies of racism and sexism. This book is a must for anyone interested in intermingling of race and gender in modern literatuire and science."--Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin, Madison
"Doyle expands current scholarship on the material."--American Literature