Family Money: Property, Race, And Literature In The Nineteenth Century (Oxford Studies In American Literary History)

Nineteenth-century fiction and legal cases show that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Understanding the significance of these relationships meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when); who could own property (and when), and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together by authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, and Harriet Beecher Stowe to Charles Chesnutt and Lydia Maria Child. Demonstrating that notions of race were entwined with economics well beyond the direct issue of slavery, Family Money reveals interracial sexuality to be a volatile mixture of emotion, economics, and law that had dramatic, long-term financial consequences.

• | Author: Jeffory A. Clymer
• | Publisher: Oxford University Press
• | Publication Date: Dec 01, 2014
• | Number of Pages: 216 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0190223871
• | ISBN-13: 9780190223878