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Miscegenated Narration: The Effects of Interracialism in Women's Popular Sentimental Romances from the Civil War Years
Miscegenated Narration: The Effects of Interracialism in Women's Popular Sentimental Romances from the Civil War Years
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Date
1900
Authors
Beeler, Connie
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Abstract
Critical work on popular American women's fiction still has not reckoned adequately with the themes of interracialism present in these novels and with interracialism's bearing on the sentimental. This thesis considers an often overlooked body of women's popular sentimental fiction, published from 1860-1865, which is interested in themes of interracial romance or reproduction, in order to provide a fuller picture of the impact that the intersection of interracialism and sentimentalism has had on American identity. By examining the literary strategy of "miscegenated narration," or the heteroglossic cacophony of narrative voices and ideological viewpoints that interracialism produces in a narrative, I argue that the hegemonic ideologies of the sentimental romance are both "deterritorialized" and "reterritorialized," a conflicted impulse that characterizes both nineteenth-century sentimental, interracial romances and the broader project of critiquing the dominant national narrative that these novels undertake.
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Publisher: University of North Texas ; Source: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc67958/ ; Level: Thesis
Keywords
Sentimental,
American Civil War,
miscegenation,
interracialism,
race in literature,
racial identity,
mixed-race characters,
Julia C. Collins,
Metta V. Victor,
G.M. Flanders,
fiction narrative,
technique,
romance