The Kitchen and the Factory
Spaces of Women's Work and the Negotiation of Social Difference in Antebellum American Literature
by Katja Kanzler
Hardback (Published)
(December 2016)
ISBN: 9783825366766
5.31 x 8.31 inches
Price: $59.00
In stock
This book asks for the cultural work that spaces of feminine labor do in antebellum texts from a variety of literary and ‘para-literary’ contexts. Singling out the kitchen and the factory, it argues that sites of women’s work serve as key textual microcosms in which antebellum culture negotiates the discourses of social difference whose relevance skyrockets in this period, especially the discourses of gender, class, ‘race,’ and nationhood. Because of their ostensible marginality on the map of the national imaginary, and because they are associated with social subjects multiply marked as marginal–women of the ‘working class’ and slave women–the kitchen and the factory enable the rehearsal of ideas that are difficult to articulate within the core narratives of nationhood: ideas about the forms and meanings of social inequality, and their relationship to the promises of equality that suffuse the nation’s mythology.
This book asks for the cultural work that spaces of feminine labor do in antebellum texts from a variety of literary and ‘para-literary’ contexts. Singling out the kitchen and the factory, it argues that sites of women’s work serve as key textual microcosms in which antebellum culture negotiates the discourses of social difference whose relevance skyrockets in this period, especially the discourses of gender, class, ‘race,’ and nationhood. Because of their ostensible marginality on the map of the national imaginary, and because they are associated with social subjects multiply marked as marginal–women of the ‘working class’ and slave women–the kitchen and the factory enable the rehearsal of ideas that are difficult to articulate within the core narratives of nationhood: ideas about the forms and meanings of social inequality, and their relationship to the promises of equality that suffuse the nation’s mythology.
- By (author) Katja Kanzler
Other Titles in this Series
Walking in Deserts, Writing out of Wounds
Jewishness and Deconstruction in Paul Auster's Literary Work
Volume 155
The Chutneyfication of History
Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Bharati Mukherjee and the Postcolonial Debate
Volume 95
Through the Bars of My Memory
Prison Life Writing and the Prison Movement of the 1970s and 1980s
Volume 319
Toward a New Metropolitanism
Reconstituting Public Culture, Urban Citizenship, and the Multicultural Imaginery in New York and Berlin
Volume 142
Renegotiating American Nationalism
The Proxy War over Marriage Equality through the Lens of Un-Americanism
Volume 317
The Americanization of Human Rights
Iranian, African, and Chinese Lives in American Autobiography
Volume 290
Crossroads in American Studies
Transnational and Biocultural Encounters. Essays in Honor of Rudiger Kunow
Volume 269
The Native American Declaration of Independence
William Apess's Reflections of Ethnic Consciousness
Volume 156
The Culture of Corporeality
Aesthetic Experience and the Embodiment of America, 1945-1960
Volume 151
Similar Books
Ars Prophetica
Theology in the Poetry of Twentieth-Century Hebrew Poets Avraham Halfi, Shin Shalom, Amir Gilboa, and T. Carmi
Cahiers de littérature française
Les Métamorphoses du texte. Enjeux intertextuels et transpositions visuelles
Volume 25
European Drama and Performance Studies
Dramatisations politiques. Théâtre, politique et idéologie au XIXe siècle (1806-1914)
Volume 27
LiCArC
Trauma et création artistique : l’engagement des artistes arabes dans des dynamiques de résiliences
Volume 14
