Gender in American Literature and Culture ed. by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gender in American Literature and Culture ed. by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis Aimee Armande Wilson Gender in American Literature and Culture. Edited by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. v + 375 pp. $39.99 cloth/$32.00 e-book. Gender in American Literature and Culture seeks to build on previous generations of feminist and gender studies scholarship. The chapters "honor the tradition of feminist recovery projects," "follow in the wake of previous critics who have redefined some of the texts that are considered canonical," and challenge "the well-entrenched white patriarchy that has often narrowly defined what counts as literary" (3). These may be familiar goals, but they are nevertheless important ones. The outcomes that the earliest feminist literary critics set out to achieve are still as worthy as they are unattained. This is not to suggest that no progress has been made but to recognize that much work remains. As editors Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis point out, "decades of canon-busting have barely nudged white male authors from their primacy of place" (3). Current issues get top billing in Gender in American Literature and Culture; a small sampling includes #MeToo and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movements, settler colonialism, transphobia, and attacks on reproductive rights. The book's scope is admirably diverse, citing "texts by forty-three white authors and forty-six writers of color, written as early as 1630 and as recently as 2018" (3). Many of these authors are well known, such as Anne Bradstreet, Edith Wharton, and Zora Neale Hurston. The book covers just as many lesser-known authors, too, including Gerda Saunders, author of a contemporary Alzheimer's memoir, and 'Afīfa Karam, an early-twentieth-century Lebanese-American journalist, novelist, and translator. As with any volume covering such a large swath of authors, topics, and time periods, comprehensiveness is impossible. The editors admit that they are not attempting comprehensiveness and, furthermore, confront the intellectual flaws of such grand-sweep styles of literary scholarship. In one of the most insightful moments in the introduction, Lutes and Travis establish the scope of the book while simultaneously commenting on the state of literary studies in 2021: "While we believe that understanding the cultural and historical operations of gender in the United States is more pressing than ever, we also recognize that a chastened model of literary criticism has emerged, one that is less confident in its transformative potential, more skeptical of liberatory claims, and more modest in its sense of what it can accomplish" (2). Although the volume was completed before the global pandemic and its continuing fallout, the inequities laid bare by these events were evident long before, and the writers in this volume respond to those extant [End Page 125] inequities. If anything, the pandemic years have made this book timelier and more urgent. As would be expected given this feminist approach, the volume does not shy away from political issues. Indeed, the feminist underpinnings of the volume can be seen in the editors' open embrace of presentism. Lutes and Travis state that the book "responds to this cultural and political moment with chapters that are presentist and activist but also keen to avoid overreaching" (2). At its best, the presentism employed by the writers in this volume simultaneously considers differences between historical periods as well as bridges between them in service of a better understanding of the conditions that led to current tragedies and political flashpoints. Each of the book's three thematic sections is organized chronologically. In the first, "Intimacies," writers consider literary depictions of intimate relationships. Chapters focus on the various forms of desire and violence contained in these relationships. Standouts include Marion Rust's "Post-Reproductive Female Sexuality and the Early American Novel," which is part of a resurgence of scholarly interest in sexuality in early American literary studies, and Travis M. Foster's "The Effeminate Man in Nineteenth-Century America," which considers the intersection of masculinity, eugenics, and white supremacy in the popular press. "Aggressions," the second section, "demonstrate[s] that gendered violence is endemic to American literary history and culture" (8). This section is the strongest of the...