Introduction

Summary

Moving across genres and centuries, Gender in American Literature and Culture demonstrates how gender has structured American literary history and how rigid inscriptions of gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States. The chapters in this collection move beyond inflexible categories of masculinity and femininity that often have reinforced restrictive assumptions about public and private spaces, work and domesticity, individualism and community, to offer more nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present. By challenging established models of authorship and gender, contributors to this volume begin to account for the many, shifting facets of gendered identities and their textual representations. Gender in American Literature and Culture thinks about gender intersectionally, as a category best understood in relation to racial, ethnic, class, and other identity markers such as religion, ability, age, and sexual orientation, and contributors explore nonbinary gender identifications as well as a broad range of normative models for girls and women, boys and men.