Blood Work: Imagining Race in American Literature, 1890–1940 - Hardcover

Salvant, Shawn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807157848 ISBN 13: 9780807157848

Publisher: LSU Press, 2015

Synopsis

The invocation of blood-as both an image and a concept-has long been critical in the formation of American racism. In Blood Work, Shawn Salvant mines works from the American literary canon to explore the multitude of associations that race and blood held in the consciousness of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans.

Drawing upon race and metaphor theory, Salvant provides readings of four classic novels featuring themes of racial identity: Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894); Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902); Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892); and William Faulkner's Light in August (1932). His expansive analysis of blood imagery uncovers far more than the merely biological connotations that dominate many studies of blood rhetoric: the racial discourses of blood in these novels encompass the anthropological and the legal, the violent and the religious. Penetrating and insightful, Blood Work illuminates the broad-ranging power of the blood metaphor to script distinctly American plots-real and literary-of racial identity.

About this title

About the Author:

Shawn Salvant is assistant professor of English and African American studies at the University of Connecticut. Born and raised on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, he received his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

About this edition

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0807157848
• ISBN 13: 9780807157848
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240