No More Separate Spheres!: A Next Wave American Studies Reader
Cathy N. Davidson (Editor), Jessamyn Hatcher (Editor), Inderpal Grewal (Editor), Caren Kaplan (Editor), Robyn WiegmanBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
No More Separate Spheres! challenges the limitations of thinking about American literature and culture within the narrow rubric of “male public” and “female private” spheres from the founders to the present. With provocative essays by an array of cutting-edge critics with diverse viewpoints, this collection examines the ways that the separate spheres binary has malingered unexamined in feminist criticism, American literary studies, and debates on the public sphere. It exemplifies new ways of analyzing gender, breaks through old paradigms, and offers a primer on feminist thinking for the twenty-first century.
Using American literary studies as a way to talk about changing categories of analysis, these essays discuss the work of such major authors as Catharine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Catharine Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, María Ampara Ruiz de Burton, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cynthia Kadohata, Chang Rae-Lee, and Samuel Delany. No More Separate Spheres! shows scholars and students different ways that gender can be approached and incorporated into literary interpretations. Feisty and provocative, it provides a forceful analysis of the limititations of any theory of gender that applies only to women, and urges suspicion of any argument that posits “woman” as a universal or uniform category.
By bringing together essays from the influential special issue of American Literature of the same name, a number of classic essays, and several new pieces commissioned for this volume, No More Separate Spheres! will be an ideal teaching tool, providing a key supplementary text in the American literature classroom.
Contributors. José F. Aranda, Lauren Berlant, Cathy N. Davidson, Judith Fetterley, Jessamyn Hatcher, Amy Kaplan, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, You-me Park, Marjorie Pryse, Elizabeth Renker, Ryan Schneider, Melissa Solomon, Siobhan Somerville, Gayle Wald , Maurice Wallace
Synopsis
Much criticism of nineteenth-century American literature written during the last quarter century has been structured by the concept of "separate spheres," a construction that often is recreated in contemporary critical practice. The contributors to this special issue examine and contest the way the category of gender-male versus female, extending to include, for example, the oppositions between public and private, worldly and domestic-has organized critical discussion regarding the formulation of American literature. Challenging the separate spheres model, these essays ask how other categories complicate this paradigm, especially with regard to issues of race, sexuality, class, region, religion, and occupation.
In No More Separate Spheres! both established and new scholars look at the changing categories of analysis-from seventies feminism to nineties postcolonialism-that have shaped this discussion. In her introduction, Cathy N. Davidson assesses the state of criticism with regard to the separate spheres debate, and sets a constructive and often provocative tone for the rest of the volume. While one essay provides an overview of the multiple fronts on which the post-separate spheres model of criticism has been engaged, others offer perspectives that either support of directly confront and critique this model. Rather than seeking to establish yet another critical formula based on the opposition of binary terms, this special issue of American Literature will help move the debate to the next level.About the Author
Cathy N. Davidson is Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University. Jessamyn Hatcher is a graduate student in the Department of English at Duke University.