Item Detail
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11956
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0
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0
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English
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Family Matters : Kinship Prohibitions and Civic Relations (A. J. Switzer, Zane Grey, Mark Twain, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins)
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San Diego, California
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University of California, San Diego (USD)
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Ph.D. diss.
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'My dissertation examines family configurations that are marked as marginal or unlawful in relation to nationhood, identity and citizenship in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature. I analyze how literary products that include uncertain kinship practices respond to national configurations of family in terms of race, class, gender and religion. By transforming, denying or renovating kinship prohibitions, these texts negotiate the meaning of family, the social territory of the white female body, and the boundaries of citizenship and identity after the Civil War. The first chapter assesses the sociohistorical context of kinship in order to situate texts that express concern over familial degeneration and press for cultural recuperation. My second chapter analyzes representations of polygamy and Mormons in relation to kinship and nationalism in A. J. Switzer's Elder Northfield's Home and Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage. Both texts locate anxiety over family and government in the white female body and link American vitality to a return to traditional models of kinship rooted in monogamy. Turning from religion to race, my third chapter probes the intersection of family, miscegenation, and science in Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson. The white rejection of black kinship expresses familial disenfranchisement and scientific fallibility while miscegenation reveals the struggle to redefine family and belonging in terms of race, purity and national destiny. This focus is extended in my fourth chapter where I consider the economic consequences that follow from miscegenation, class and nationalism in Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition. Demanding equal citizenship for the African-American family, Chesnutt upends gender ideologies with a mixed-race heroine and insists on black contributions to American identity. My fifth chapter examines how literary tensions over interracial contact relate to incest, citizenship and blood in Hopkins' Of One Blood. By reimagining kinship on an international stage, Hopkins offers an alternative kinship model that emphasizes character and sensibility over race and privilege. The last chapter recognizes the social construction of the family in order to emphasize naturalized assumptions about American identity and citizenship embedded in race, gender and religion. My study reveals the intimate connections between American kinship norms and ideologies of nationhood.' (author's abstract)