Daniel A. Novak - Böcker

This fascinating account of the relationship between photography and literary realism in Victorian Britain draws on detailed readings of photographs, writings about photography, and fiction by Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Oscar Wilde. While other critics have argued that photography defined what would be 'real' for literary fiction, Daniel A. Novak demonstrates that photography itself was associated with the unreal - with fiction and the literary imagination. Once we acknowledge that manipulation was essential rather than incidental to the project of nineteenth-century realism, our understanding of the relationship between photography and fiction changes in important ways. Novak argues that while realism may seem to make claims to particularity and individuality, both in fiction and in photography, it relies much more on typicality than on perfect reproduction. Illustrated with many photographs, this book represents an important contribution to current debates on the nature of Victorian realism.

Emancipation brought an end to many of the evils of slavery, but it did not do away with involuntary servitude in the South. Even during Reconstruction, state legislatures passed laws that bound laborers to the landowner with a nearly unbreakable tie -- which still chains many a rural black to what a 1914 Supreme Court ruling called an "ever-turning wheel of servitude."Daniel Novak shows how federal, state, and local regulations combined in an undisguised effort to keep southern agriculture supplied with black labor. A freedman who did not immediately enter into a labor contract was subject to arrest as a vagrant. Once a contract was agreed upon, it was a criminal offense for a laborer to fail to carry it out, no matter how unfair the terms might be.If, as was almost inevitable, the freedman fell into debt to the landowner, he could be kept in service until repayment-and exorbitant interest rates and judicious bookkeeping could often postpone that day indefinitely. Novak traces the sporadic efforts of the federal government to do away with this kind of peonage. In studying the details of the legal basis for peonage in the South, he breaks new ground. The institution has aroused surprisingly little interest in the past; this compelling account should do much to establish that peonage is one of the most severe and widespread violations of civil rights in the nation.

Masculinity, as both performed and studied, continues to be a particularly productive site for understanding cultural dynamics. Contemporary work within women's and gender studies programs recognizes that potential, regularly exploring masculine, bisexual, and transgendered subjectivities in the classroom and in scholarship. This collection of essays on masculinity offers a unique perspective on the topic by featuring articles ranging from early work in biological science and gender behavior to contemporary sociocultural readings of feminist pedagogy, gender violence, and global masculinities. The anthology provides specific insight into critical conversations on masculinity as they have unfolded over time and in the pages of Feminist Formations. Structured around highly readable essays on a wide range of topics and disciplines, it provides a basic introduction to the question of masculinity before moving on to studies of masculinity, science, and the body. The volume closes with two parts that discuss performing masculinity in global and domestic contexts.This survey of masculinity relates to a number of diverse subject areas, including biology, film, literature, economics, and political science. As such, the book is ideal both as a primary text in women's and gender studies courses and as a reference for faculty and students outside the discipline applying gender issues to their teaching and research.