Domestic Allegories Of Political Desire Paperback

Claudia Tate

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 centre 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 A

0195108574

9780195108576

English

Oxford University Press

1-Feb-10

318