Race and Time urges our attention to women鈥檚 poetry in considering the cultural history of race. Building on close readings of well known and less familiar poets鈥攊ncluding Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Sarah Louisa Forten, Hannah Flagg Gould, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sarah Piatt, Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert, Sarah Josepha Hale, Eliza Follen, and Mary Mapes Dodge鈥擥ray traces tensions in women鈥檚 literary culture from the era of abolitionism to the rise of the Plantation tradition. She devotes a chapter to children鈥檚 verse, arguing that racial stereotypes work as 鈥渘onsense鈥 that masks conflicts in the construction of white childhood. A compilation of the poems cited, most of which are difficult to find elsewhere, is included as an appendix.
Gray clarifies the cultural roles women鈥檚 poetry played in the nineteenth-century United States and also reveals that these poems offer a fascinating, dynamic, and diverse field for students of social and cultural history. Gray鈥檚 readings provide a rich sense of the contexts in which this poetry is embedded and examine its aesthetic and political vitality in meticulous detail, linking careful explication of the texts with analysis of the history of poetry, canons, literacy, and literary authority.
Race and Time distinguishes itself from other critical studies not only through its searching, in-depth readings but also through its sustained attention to less known poets and its departure from a Dickinson-centered model. Most significantly, it offers a focus on race, demonstrating how changes in both the U.S. racial structure and women鈥檚 place in public culture set the terms for change in how women poets envisioned the relationship between poetry and social power.
Gray鈥檚 work makes contributions to several fields of study: poetry, U.S. literary history and American studies, women鈥檚 studies, African American studies and whiteness studies, children鈥檚 literature, and cultural studies. While placing the works of figures who have been treated elsewhere (e.g., Dickinson and Harper) into revealing new relationships, Race and Time does much to open interdisciplinary discussion of unfamiliar works.
鈥淕ray鈥檚 arguments and interpretations are convincing and compelling. She convincingly illustrates how the complex relationship between racial and temporal thematics is at the heart of nineteenth-century American women鈥檚 poetry and poetics. In the process, she reveals the ways in which these texts and their contexts are a fascinating, dynamic, and diverse field for scholars of nineteenth-century U.S. social and cultural history鈥攊n particular, scholars examining race, gender, modes of historical representation, childhood, literary history, and print culture.鈥濃擥regory Eiselein, editor of Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings
鈥淕ray鈥檚 readings of individual works are brilliant: she consistently astonishes the reader with her supple elucidation of the sense and nonsense of this poetry, and what had seemed a simple and trivial verse suddenly presents itself as a rich cultural artifact. . . . Gray鈥檚 work is an important contribution to the practice of reading race back into literature.鈥濃擩ames Wallace, Boston College
Contents
Acknowledgments
I. Introduction
1. Wrappings, A Methodological Introduction
2. Contesting the Pearl, Whiteness, Blackness, and the Possession of American Poetry
II. Antebellum
3. 鈥淪kins May Differ,鈥 Women鈥檚 Republicanism and the Poetics of Abolitionism
4. The Mummy Returns, Humor, Kinship, and the Bindings of Print
III. Postbellum
5. Looking in the Glass, Sarah Piatt鈥檚 Poetics of Play and Loss
6. We Women Radicals, Frances Harper鈥檚 Poetics of Radical Formation
7. What One Is Not Was, Mary Eliza Tucker Lambert鈥檚 Poetics of Self-Reconstruction
8. Critical Positions in Racial Modernity, An Approach to Teaching
IV. Other Times: Childhood and Nonsense
9. The Containment of Childhood, Reproducing Consumption in American Children鈥檚 Verse
Appendix: Poems Cited
Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, The Kneeling Slave
Sarah Louise Forten, An Appeal to Women
Frances E.W. Harper, The Slave Mother
Hannah Flagg Gould, The Slave Mother鈥檚 Prayer
Hannah Flagg Gould, The Child鈥檚 Address to the Kentucky Mummy
Sarah Piatt, A Child鈥檚 Party (in Kentucky, A.D. 185_)
Frances Harper, Aunt Chloe
Mary Eliza Perine Tucker Lambert, Loew鈥檚 Bridge, a Broadway Idyl
Anonymous, The Three Little Kittens
Sarah Josepha Hale, Mary鈥檚 Lamb
Mary Mapes Dodge, Shephard John
Mary Mapes Dodge, The Way to Do It
Hannah Flagg Gould, Apprehension
Mary Mapes Dodge, The Wooden Horse
Hannah Flagg Gould, The Butterfly鈥檚 Dream
Mary Mapes Dodge, The Mayor of Scuttleton
Lizzie W. Champney, How Persimmons Took Cah ob der Baby
Notes
Works Cited
Index
