Synopses & Reviews
Michele Birnbaum examines representations of interracial work bonds in fiction and literary correspondence by black and white authors and artists.
Synopsis
This study analyzes literary representations of work relationships across the color-line from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Birnbaum examines interracial bonds in fiction and literary correspondence by black and white authors and artists - including Elizabeth Keckley, Frances E. W. Harper, W. D. Howells, Grace King, Kate Chopin, Langston Hughes, Amy Spingarn and Carl Van Vechten - exploring the way servants and employers, doctors and patients, and patrons and artists negotiate their racial differences for artistic and political ends. This study will be of interest to scholars in both literary and cultural studies.
About the Author
Michele Birnbaum is associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Puget Sound where she is also Director of Women's Studies. She is currently a Hewlitt Fellow at the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. Her work has appeared in journals such as American Literature, African American Review, as well as in edited collections of essays.
Table of Contents
Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction: Working relations and racial desire; 1. Dressing down the first lady: Elizabeth Keckley's Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House; 2. Off-color patients in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy and W. D. Howells' An Imperative Duty; 3. 'Alien hands' in Kate Chopin's The Awakening; 4. 'For blood that is not yours': Langston Hughes and the art of patronage; Epilogue: 'Co-workers in the kingdom of culture'.