Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

JULIE HUSBAND is Associate Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, USA.

• Introduction The Emergence of the Family Politics Campaign and Antislavery Sentimentality Marketplace Politics in The Scarlet Letter Lydia Maria Child and the Mothering State The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace: E.D.E.N. Southworth's Southern Reforms 'The White Slave of the North': Lowell Mill Women and the Evolution of 'Free Labour' The End of Antislavery Sentimentality: Frederick Douglass's Post-Civil War Performance of Masculinity

"In an important and ground-breaking book, Husband has corralled a compelling basket of texts and arguments to support her case. There is much here for the amateur and the professional scholar alike." - Larry Hudson, Department of History, University of Rochester "The writers Husband treats in Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature are the co-creators of our present progressive political discourse, their issues our issues: health care, diversity, civil rights ...She understands the complexity and constraint of sentimentalist plots and logics in their writing, especially as they struggle to address their urgent social issues." - Neil Schmitz, Professor of American Literature, SUNY-Buffalo "A welcome fresh look ...Tracing the afterlife of antislavery discourse beyond the Civil War, Husband succeeds in illuminating both the continuities between the maternalist politics of antebellum and Progressive-era women reformers and the paradigm shift Frederick Douglass initiated in civil rights agitation by rejecting sentimental images of broken families for embodiments of black masculinity." - Carolyn L. Karcher, author of The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child