Moving boldly between literary analysis and political theory, contemporary and antebellum US culture, Arthur Riss invites readers to rethink prevailing accounts of the relationship between slavery, ...liberalism, and literary representation. Situating Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass at the center of antebellum debates over the person-hood of the slave, this 2006 book examines how a nation dedicated to the proposition that 'all men are created equal' formulates arguments both for and against race-based slavery. This revisionary argument promises to be unsettling for literary critics, political philosophers, historians of US slavery, as well as those interested in the link between literature and human rights.
Not only did fugitivity enrage and radicalize white southerners to push for greater restrictions on enslaved people, it also visibly contradicted arguments by southern politicians that enslavement ...benefited both enslaver and enslaved. ...fugitivity and the presence of self-liberated enslaved people in the Northeast acted as a sort of muse for abolitionist authors. ...through fugitivism and other acts of rebellion, enslaved people were critical from the founding period to the Civil War in ushering forth the controversies in the white public sphere that would lead to slavery's abolition. Despite these issues, Delbanco has written a compelling new synthesis about the cultural, social, and political ruptures around fugitivism leading up to the war. ...Delbanco's skills as a literature scholar give his work an advantage over other historians, integrating effective literary analysis into this political history.
Models of this piece were crafted in Florence against the backdrop of the recent Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, and embodied neoclassical "archetypes of whiteness," in the words ...of Kirk Savage (Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, 1997), as American race theorists imagined the ideal human form. On the one hand, proslavery polemicists like the Virginian George Fitzhugh regularly invoked the glories of slave societies of the greater Mediterranean World-"the ruins of Thebes, of Nineveh, and of Balbec, the obelisks and pyramids of Egypt, the lovely and time-defying relics of Roman and Grecian art, the Doric column and the Gothic spire," to buttress the chattel principle's alleged connection with high civilization (Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society, 1854). ...as the historian Margaret Malamud has argued, African Americans in the nineteenth century drew upon the western classics to debunk the myriad myths of Black inferiority (African Americans and The Classics: Antiquity, Abolition and Activism, 2016). The politics of transatlantic abolition imbued Story's art, and conceivably helped shape his deviation from what the abolitionist novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe called "the cold elegance of Greek lines" ("Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl," 1863).
While there is now some agreement among secularity scholars as to their definitions, outside the field, as Joan Wallach Scott notes, "secular (referring to things nonreligious), secularization (the ...historical process by which transcendent religious authority is replaced by knowledge that can only originate with reasoning humans), and secularity (a nonreligious state of being) tend to be conflated under the umbrella of secularism. "4 In the Christian tradition, he explains, "secular" first referred to "secular clergy," or those "ordinary parish priests, as opposed to the religious of the monastic orders" who sequestered themselves in monasteries.5 The secular eventually came to be associated with the separation of religion and government when the early Puritans "differentiated spiritual and secular functions as part of their critique of the established church" by relegating "marriage to secular authorities. ...secularization," Warner notes, generally refers to "a variety of social changes … that change the position of religious institutions in the social landscape. ...as Kevin Seidel asks, "what if, in light of recent scholarship on secularism, we understood secularity not as the waning or disappearing of religious beliefs and practices so much as their reorganization?"11 This question brings to mind Charles Taylor's idea that "the shift to secularity" can be understood as a change "that takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith … is one human possibility among others.
In the first chapter, "Bound Children: Sidestepping the Social Contract in Apprenticeship Literature," Soderberg reads William Apess's autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829), and Harriet Wilson's ...semi-autobiographical novel, Our Nig (1859), through apprenticeship contracts. ...it lets us see children not as retreats into either domestic bliss or sentimental catharsis, but as products of and participants in their social world. In the conclusion, Soderberg notes that after the Civil War, ideas about childhood evolved: responsibility for child welfare shifted from family and commercial interests to the state; the Fourteenth Amendment stabilized citizenship, while Darwinian ideas helped explain heritability. Soderberg also notes that even into the twenty-first century, children are treated unequally due to race, ethnicity, or social class.
"They Are Truly Marvelous Cats" SACKS, MARCY S.
The journal of the Civil War era,
06/2021, Letnik:
11, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article focuses on the presence of companion animals in Union army camps during the US Civil War. It argues that soldiers turned to animals of all kinds (including cats, dogs, mice, and pigs, ...along with less common species), despite official sanction against such practices, to ameliorate boredom and to distract themselves from the horror at hand. Most importantly, pets helped the soldiers reconnect with their humanity in the midst of the necessarily dehumanizing act of waging war. The study draws principally on the letters and journals of Federal soldiers, along with sketches and photographs, to demonstrate not only animals' ubiquity of in military camps but also their importance to the men at war.
KEYWORDS: Martin Delany, Black domesticity, citizenship, nineteenth-century literature This article examines the political significance, and the limitations, of the representation of the Black ...patriarchal figure in Martin R. Delany's Blake, or the Huts of America, and how the (re)writing of Black domesticity is central to the novel's blueprint for Black citizenship. While Delany's novel imagines a political coalition founded upon a Black domestic order, the representation of the Black patriarchy delimits Black female agency as it also reemphasizes the gendered hierarchy within domesticity.
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