Blood Work: Imagining Race in American Literature, 1890-1940 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780807157848)

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.

Author: Shawn Salvant
ISBN-10: 0807157848
ISBN-13: 9780807157848
Publisher: LSU Press
Language: English
Published: 01/12/2015
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.94lbs
Size: 8.65h x 5.74w x 1.02d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 02/13/2015 pg. 19
Choice 07/01/2015