No More Separate Spheres! challenges the limitations of thinking about nineteenth-century American culture within the narrow rubric of "male public" and "female private" spheres. With provocative essays by an array of cutting-edge critics with diverse viewpoints, this collection examines the ways that the separate spheres binary has malingered in unexamined ways in feminist criticism, American literary studies, and debates on the public sphere. It exemplifies other ways of reading and thinking about gender by including such factors as race, sexuality, class, region, and nationalism. Using American literary studies as a way to talk about changing categories of analysis, these essays discuss the work of such major authors as Catharine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. DuBois, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton. No More Separate Spheres! shows scholars and students different ways that gender can be approached and incorporated into literary interpretations and, conversely, how using gender as an explanatory category reveals new insights into texts, authors, literary history, and theory.
By bringing together essays from the influential special issue of American Literature of the same name, a number of classic essays, and several new pieces commissioned for this volume, No More Separate Spheres! will be an ideal teaching tool, a key supplementary text in any American literature classroom. It breaks through old paradigms and offers a primer on feminist thinking for the twenty-first century.