Philosophies of Sex: Critical Essays on The Hermaphrodite

Description

Philosophies of Sex: Critical Essays on The Hermaphrodite is the first collection of critical studies of Julia Ward Howe's long-secret novel that, since its initial publication in 2004, has caused a seismic shift in how we understand gender awareness and sexuality in antebellum America. Howe figures in the history of the nineteenth-century American literature primarily as a poet, most famous for having written the lyrics to 'Battle Hymn of the Republic.' Renée Bergland and Gary Williams have assembled a luminous array of essays by eminent scholars of the nineteenth-century American literature, providing fascinating and widely differing contexts in which to understand Howe's venture into territory altogether foreign to American writers in her day. An introduction by Bergland and Williams traces the (re)discovery of Howe's manuscript and the beginnings of commentary as word spread about this remarkable text. Mary Grant, an early reader, invokes the excitement and frontier spirit of women's history in the 1970s. Marianne Noble and Laura Saltz place the narrative within the frames of European and American Romanticism and of Howe’s other writings. Betsy Klimasmith, Williams, Bethany Schneider, and Joyce Warren explore connections between Howe’s novel and other ground-breaking nineteenth-century works on gender, sexuality, and relationship. Bergland and Suzanne Ashworth exploreThe Hermaphrodite's suggestive invocations of two other kinds of “texts”: sculpture and theology. Laurence returns / Gary Williams and Renée Bergland -- Meeting the hermaphrodite / Mary H. Grant -- Indeterminate sex and text : the manuscript status of The hermaphrodite / Karen Sánchez-Eppler -- From self-erasure to self-possession : the development of Howe's feminist consciousness / Marianne Noble -- "Rather both than neither" : the polarity of gender in Howe's Hermaphrodite / Laura Saltz -- "Never. . .the half of another" : marriage and the science of sex in The hermaphrodite / Betsy Klimasmith -- Howe's Hermaphrodite and Alcott's "Mephistopheles" : unpublished cross-gender thinking / Joyce W. Warren -- "The cruelest enemy of beauty" : Sand's Gabriel, Howe's Laurence / Gary Williams -- The consummate hermaphrodite / Bethany Schneider -- Cold stone : sex and sculpture in The hermaphrodite / Renée Bergland -- Spiritualized bodies and posthuman possibilities : technologies of intimacy in The hermaphrodite / Suzanne Ashworth -- Unrealized : the queer time of The hermaphrodite / Dana Luciano -- Howe now? / Elizabeth Young.