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Impossible Purities : Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture by Brody, Jennifer DeVere is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Impossible Purities : Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture about?

Using black feminist theory and African American studies to read Victorian culture, Impossible Purities looks at the construction of “Englishness” as white, masculine, and pure and “Americanness” as black, feminine, and impure. Brody’s readings of Victorian novels, plays, paintings, and science fiction reveal the impossibility of purity and the inevitability of hybridity in representations of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and race. She amasses a considerable amount of evidence to show that Victorian culture was bound inextricably to various forms and figures of blackness. Opening with a reading of Daniel Defoe’s “A True-Born Englishman,” which posits the mixed origins of English identity, Brody goes on to analyze mulattas typified by Rhoda Swartz in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair , whose mixed-race status reveals the “unseemly origins of English imperial power.” Examining Victorian stage productions from blackface minstrel shows to performances of The Octoroon and Uncle Tom’s Cabin , she explains how such productions depended upon feminized, “black” figures in order to reproduce Englishmen as masculine white subjects. She also discusses H.G. Wells’s The Isla

Who reads Impossible Purities : Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture?

Author

Brody, Jennifer DeVere

Publisher

Duke University Press Books

Published

1998

Language

EN

ISBN

9780822396956

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Anthropology, History