Bordering on the Body The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture [Paperback]

The figure of the mother in literature and the arts has been the subject of much recent critical attention. Whereas many studies have focused on women writers and the maternal, Laura Doyle significantly broadens the field by tracing the racial logic internal to Western representations of maternality at least since Romanticism. She formulates a theory of racial patriarchy in which the circumscription of reproduction within racial borders engenders what she calls the race mother in literary and cultural narratives. Pairing literary movements not often considered together--Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance--Doyle reveals that this figure haunts the openings of diverse modern novels and initiates their experimental narrative trajectories. Figures such as the slave mother inInvisible Man, Lena Grove inLight in August, Mrs. Dedalus inUlysses, and Sethe inBeloved, Doyle shows, embody racial, sexual, and metaphysical anxieties which modern authors expose reconfigure, and attempt to surpass.
Making use of heterogeneous materials, including kinship studies, phenomenology, and histories of slavery,Bordering on the Bodytraces the symbolic operations of the race mother from Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology to eugenics and twentieth-century fiction. A breakthrough in race and gender theory, a racial reconfiguration of modernism, and a reinterpretation of discourses of nature since Romanticism, the book will engage a wide spectrum of readers in literary and cultural studies.

A useful and important study....Will provide a radical rereading of modernist texts. --Choice

Doyle's is an original and striking study of a rich variety of modernisms, working with discernment and elegance at the 'compounded' intersection of race, sexualities, and gender. --Rachel Blau DuPlessis,Temple University

Laura Doyle's book is a timely, readable, and exceedingly provocative analysis of thl£&