The Gender of Freedom Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere [Paperback]

In a sweeping reassessment of early American literature,The Gender of Freedomexplores the workings of the literary public spherefrom its colonial emergence through the antebellum flourishing of sentimentalism. Placing representations of and by women at the center rather than the margin of the public sphere, this book links modern forms of political identity to the seemingly private images of gender displayed prominently in the developing public sphere. The fictions of liberalism explored in this book are those of marriage and motherhood, sentimental domesticity, and heterosexual desirenarratives that structure the private realm upon which liberalism depends for its meaning and value. In a series of bold theoretical arguments and nuanced readings of literary texts, the author explores the political force of these private narratives with chapters on the Antinomian crisis in Puritan Massachusetts, early national models of gender and marriage in the works of Charles Brockden Brown and Hannah Webster Foster, infanticide narratives and nineteenth-century accounts of motherhood in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child, and re-arranging marriage in the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Through an impressive synthesis of critical material from a wide range of disciplines and some astute readings of political theorists from Adam Smith to J?rgen Habermas, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has produced an intriguing and largely persuasive account of the relationship between liberalism and gender difference. In a sweeping reassessment of early American literature,The Gender of Freedomexplores the workings of the literary public spherefrom its colonial emergence through the antebellum flourishing of sentimentalismand places representations of and by women at the center rather than the margin of the public sphere and the politics of liberalism.Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University. In this highly intlSR