Race And Gender In Louisa May Alcott S My Contraband

Author : Cornelia Charlotte Reuscher
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
Page : 37 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2011-03-20
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9783640859092

Get Book

Race and Gender in Louisa May Alcott's My Contraband by Cornelia Charlotte Reuscher Pdf

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, University of Hamburg, course: Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries, 6 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction Louisa May Alcott is one of the best known American female writers of the 19th Century. Her work primarily dealt with the role of women in society, accompanied by other topics such as work and the issue of slavery. The short story "My Contraband", first published in 1863 under the title "The Brothers", depicts both gender and racial issues. Set in the sphere of the Civil war and war hospitals, it is the story of the encounter of a white nurse and a mulatto contraband. Throughout the plot, Alcott paints a fascinating and dense picture of female desire and the fascination emanating from the mulatto. Though no explicit sexual action happens between the two, there are many hints at a strong erotic desire on the nurse's part. This paper will investigate the way in which this mulatto is described, in which way this is linked to the forbidden desire of the white nurse and what her strategies are to make this desire less a taboo. My assumption here is that the nurse has to somehow "whiten" the contraband in order to make her desire more explicable and at least a little more "legal". To prove this thesis, I will begin with a short overview of the historical background against which the story is set. In the following chapter, after a synopsis of the story itself, I will firstly take a closer look at the introduction of the contraband, secondly at the description of the nurse and investigate in how far racial stereotypes are introduced and used and, in the description of the woman, in how far she does or does not correspond to the ideal of womanhood in the 19th century. Concluding, I will describe the tabooed relationship between the two and the woman's strategy to deal with her desire. [...]

Author : Louisa May Alcott
Publisher : UPNE
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1555533078

Get Book

Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery by Louisa May Alcott Pdf

The passionate supporter of abolition and women's rights speaks out on the most controversial issues of the day.

Author : Jennifer Putzi
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2012-06-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780820343440

Get Book

Identifying Marks by Jennifer Putzi Pdf

What we know of the marked body in nineteenth-century American literature and culture often begins with The Scarlet Letter's Hester Prynne and ends with Moby Dick's Queequeg. This study looks at the presence of marked men and women in a more challenging array of canonical and lesser-known works, including exploration narratives, romances, and frontier novels. Jennifer Putzi shows how tattoos, scars, and brands can function both as stigma and as emblem of healing and survival, thus blurring the borderline between the biological and social, the corporeal and spiritual. Examining such texts as Typee, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, The Morgesons, Iola Leroy, and Contending Forces, Putzi relates the representation of the marked body to significant events, beliefs, or cultural shifts, including tattooing and captivity, romantic love, the patriarchal family, and abolition and slavery. Her particular focus is on both men and women of color, as well as white women-in other words, bodies that did not signify personhood in the nineteenth century and thus by their very nature were grotesque. Complicating the discourse on agency, power, and identity, these texts reveal a surprisingly complex array of representations of and responses to the marked body--some that are a product of essentialist thinking about race and gender identities and some that complicate, critique, or even rebel against conventional thought.

Author : Robert Leigh Davis
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 138 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2023-09-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780520918641

Get Book

Whitman and the Romance of Medicine by Robert Leigh Davis Pdf

In this compelling, accessible examination of one of America's greatest cultural and literary figures, Robert Leigh Davis details the literary and social significance of Walt Whitman's career as a nurse during the American Civil War. Davis shows how the concept of "convalescence" in nineteenth-century medicine and philosophy—along with Whitman's personal war experiences—provide a crucial point of convergence for Whitman's work as a gay and democratic writer. In his analysis of Whitman's writings during this period—Drum-Taps, Democratic Vistas, Memoranda During the War, along with journalistic works and correspondence—Davis argues against the standard interpretation that Whitman's earliest work was his best. He finds instead that Whitman's hospital writings are his most persuasive account of the democratic experience. Deeply moved by the courage and dignity of common soldiers, Whitman came to identify the Civil War hospitals with the very essence of American democratic life, and his writing during this period includes some of his most urgent reflections on suffering, sympathy, violence, and love. Davis concludes this study with an essay on the contemporary medical writer Richard Selzer, who develops the implications of Whitman's ideas into a new theory of medical narrative.

Author : Gregory Eiselein,Anne K. Phillips
Publisher : Greenwood
Page : 448 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2001-02-28
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : UOM:39015053482470

Get Book

The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia by Gregory Eiselein,Anne K. Phillips Pdf

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is arguably the most widely read 19th-century author in America. Even through the 1990s, her books continued to appear on bestseller lists and her works were made into films. She has long been a staple of children's literature courses and now also receives significant attention in American studies and women's studies classes. While her tremendous popularity has yielded numerous biographies and a growing number of critical works, very few reference books have been devoted to Alcott studies and none are particularly current or complete. This book collects in a comprehensive and reliable single volume the most important facts about Alcott's life and works. This reference surveys the basic biographical details about Alcott's family and personal life. It supplies essential information on her historical and cultural contexts, including her place in the 19th century publishing milieu, various reform movements, and major historical events, such as the Civil War. It also treats her writings, both the adult and children's works, in an accurate, informative, and accessible manner. The volume includes more than 600 alphabetically arranged entries. Each entry discusses the topic's relevance to Alcott's life and current scholarship about her. Many of the entries close with brief bibliographies, and the book concludes with a list of works for further reading.

Author : Richard Kopley,Barbara Cantalupo
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0404615988

Get Book

Prospects for the Study of American Literature (II) by Richard Kopley,Barbara Cantalupo Pdf

What can there possibly be left to say about . . .? This common litany, resonant both in and outside of academia, reflects a growing sense that the number of subjects and authors appropriate for literary study is rapidly becoming exhausted. Take heart, admonishes Richard Kopley in this dynamic new anthology--for this is decidedly not the case. While generations of literary study have unquestionably covered much ground in analyzing canonical writers, many aspects of even the most well-known authors--both their lives and their work-- remain underexamined. Among the authors discussed are T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, Willa Cather, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain.

Author : Diana Rebekkah Paulin
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 346 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2012
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780816670987

Get Book

Imperfect Unions by Diana Rebekkah Paulin Pdf

Highlights the interplay of race, literature, and nation-building in U.S. history

Author : Louisa May Alcott
Publisher : ReadHowYouWant.com
Page : 50 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2008-08-15
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9781427058188

Get Book

The Brothers by Louisa May Alcott Pdf

The Brothers (1863), also known as My Contraband by Louisa May Alcott, is a short story regarding the American Civil War with depiction of an attack on the Fort Wagner. During the war, two brothers, one white brother and the other a half black meet in a hospital. Due to a previous a grudge between them the black one tries to kill the white one. Preaching the religion of humanity and kindness, she draws from her personal experiences to create this amazing work.

Author : Diana Rebekkah Paulin
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 538 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : Electronic
ISBN : STANFORD:36105019740880

Get Book

Staging Miscegenation by Diana Rebekkah Paulin Pdf

Author : Michelle Ann Abate
Publisher : Temple University Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2008-06-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781592137244

Get Book

Tomboys by Michelle Ann Abate Pdf

Starting with the figure of the bold, boisterous girl in the mid-19th century and ending with the “girl power” movement of the 1990’s, Tomboys is the first full-length critical study of this gender-bending code of female conduct. Michelle Abate uncovers the origins, charts the trajectory, and traces the literary and cultural transformations that the concept of “tomboy” has undergone in the United States. Abate focuses on literature including Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding and films such as Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon and Jon Avnet's Fried Green Tomatoes. She also draws onlesser-known texts like E.D.E.N. Southworth's once wildly popular 1859 novel The Hidden Hand, Cold War lesbian pulp fiction, and New Queer Cinema from the 1990s. Tomboys also explores the gender and sexual dynamics of tomboyism, and offers intriguing discussions of race and ethnicity's role in the construction of the enduring cultural archetype. Abate’s insightful analysis provides useful, thought-provoking connections between different literary works and eras. The result demystifies this cultural phenomenon and challenges readers to consider tomboys in a whole new light.

Author : Cornelia Charlotte Reuscher
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
Page : 13 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2006-08-28
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9783638539173

Get Book

Race and Gender in Louisa May Alcott's "My Contraband" by Cornelia Charlotte Reuscher Pdf

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, University of Hamburg, course: Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries , 6 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction Louisa May Alcott is one of the best known American female writers of the 19th Century. Her work primarily dealt with the role of women in society, accompanied by other topics such as work and the issue of slavery. The short story “My Contraband”, first published in 1863 under the title “The Brothers”, depicts both gender and racial issues. Set in the sphere of the Civil war and war hospitals, it is the story of the encounter of a white nurse and a mulatto contraband. Throughout the plot, Alcott paints a fascinating and dense picture of female desire and the fascination emanating from the mulatto. Though no explicit sexual action happens between the two, there are many hints at a strong erotic desire on the nurse’s part. This paper will investigate the way in which this mulatto is described, in which way this is linked to the forbidden desire of the white nurse and what her strategies are to make this desire less a taboo. My assumption here is that the nurse has to somehow “whiten” the contraband in order to make her desire more explicable and at least a little more “legal”. To prove this thesis, I will begin with a short overview of the historical background against which the story is set. In the following chapter, after a synopsis of the story itself, I will firstly take a closer look at the introduction of the contraband, secondly at the description of the nurse and investigate in how far racial stereotypes are introduced and used and, in the description of the woman, in how far she does or does not correspond to the ideal of womanhood in the 19th century. Concluding, I will describe the tabooed relationship between the two and the woman’s strategy to deal with her desire. [...]

Author : William M. Etter
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2010-01-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781443818889

Get Book

The Good Body by William M. Etter Pdf

The Good Body: Normalizing Visions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 1836–1867 examines literary and cultural representations of so-called “normal” and “abnormal” bodies in the antebellum and Civil War-era United States and the ways in which these representations operated as a means of justifying, critiquing, and problematizing prominent concerns of the period: the relationship between the health of American citizens and national progress, Western expansion, debates over slavery, the threatened dissolution of the Union in the Civil War, and the legitimation of the post-war reunified nation. Considering a wide range of sources—classic works of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry; health reform textbooks; proslavery documents; photographs of Civil War veterans; and Civil War medical records of the federal government—this study demonstrates that American literature of this period typically imagined real and fictional bodies as healthy, aesthetically pleasing, and symbolically coherent in relation to other bodies imagined as deviating from these “norms” to preserve existing political and social orders but also, at times, to challenge the hegemonic power of US institutions. In addition to the literary material considered, central in this book are critical approaches to history and disability studies which illuminate the construction of physical “normality” and contribute to recent scholarly attempts to assess the significance of physical differences in the literature and culture of the United States.

Author : Kirsten Twelbeck
Publisher : transcript Verlag
Page : 439 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2018-07-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783839434659

Get Book

Beyond the Civil War Hospital by Kirsten Twelbeck Pdf

Beyond the Civil War Hospital understands Reconstruction as a period of emotional turmoil that precipitated a struggle for form in cultural production. By treating selected texts from that era as multifaceted contributions to Reconstruction's »mental adaptation process« (Leslie Butler), Kirsten Twelbeck diagnoses individual conflicts between the »heart and the brain« only partly compensated for by a shared concern for national healing. By tracing each text's unique adaptation of the healing trope, she identifies surprising disagreement over racial equality, women's rights, and citizenship. The book pairs female and male white authors from the antislavery North, and brings together a broad range of genres.

Author : Samina Najmi,Rajini Srikanth
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2012-02-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780791488089

Get Book

White Women in Racialized Spaces by Samina Najmi,Rajini Srikanth Pdf

At once racially privileged and sexually marginalized, white women have been energetic in calling for solidarity among all women in opposing patriarchy, but have not been equally motivated to examine their own racial privilege. White Women in Racialized Spaces turns primarily to literature to illuminate the undeniable blind spots in white women's comprehension of their advantage. The contributors cover extensive historical ground, from early captivity narratives of white women in seventeenth-century America up to the present-day trials of Louise Woodward and Manjit Basuta, both British nannies accused of causing the deaths of their infant charges in the United States. Their wide-ranging discussions also include representations of white women in Native American, Latin American, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern contexts. The volume ultimately makes the case that, by creating alternative scenarios to particular ethical, political, or emotional problems against which readers and characters test their responses, literature forms an ideal vehicle for exploring white women's actual and potential roles in their efforts to undercut the oppressive force of whiteness.

Author : Colleen Glenney Boggs
Publisher : Modern Language Association
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2016-08-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781603292771

Get Book

Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War by Colleen Glenney Boggs Pdf

When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1863, he reportedly greeted her as "the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War." To this day, Uncle Tom's Cabin serves as a touchstone for the war. Yet few works have been selected to represent the Civil War's literature, even though historians have filled libraries with books on the war itself. This volume helps teachers address the following questions: What is the relation of canonical works to the multitude of occasional texts that were penned in response to the Civil War, and how can students understand them together? Should an approach to war literature reflect the chronology of historical events or focus instead on thematic clusters, generic forms, and theoretical concerns? How do we introduce students to archival materials that sometimes support, at other times resist, the close reading practices in which they have been trained? Twenty-three essays cover such topics as visiting historical sites to teach the literature, using digital materials, teaching with anthologies; soldiers' dime novels, Confederate women's diaries, songs, speeches; the conflicted theme of treason, and the double-edged theme of brotherhood; how battlefield photographs synthesize fact and fiction; and the roles in the war played by women, by slaves, and by African American troops. A section of the volume provides a wealth of resources for teachers.