In "Producing American Races" Patricia McKee examines three authors who have powerfully influenced the formation of racial identities in the United States: Henry James, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. Using their work to argue that race becomes visible only through image production and exchange, McKee illuminates the significance that representational practice has had in the process of racial construction.
McKee provides close readings of six novels--James's "The Wings of the Dove" and "The Golden Bowl," Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" and "Light in August," and Morrison's "Sula" and "Jazz"--interspersed with excursions into Lacanian and Freudian theory, critical race theory, epistemology, and theories of visuality. In James and Faulkner, she finds, race is represented visually through media that highlight ways of seeing and being seen. Written in the early twentieth century, the novels of James and Faulkner reveal how whiteness depended on visual culture even before film and television became its predominant media. In Morrison, the culture is aural and oral--and often about the absence of the visual. Because Morrison's African American communities produce identity in nonvisual, even anti-visual terms, McKee argues, they refute not just white representations of black persons as objects but also visual orders of representation that have constructed whites as subjects and blacks as objects.
With a theoretical approach that both complements and transcends current scholarship about race--and especially whiteness--"Producing American Races" will engage scholars in American literature, critical race theory, African American studies, and cultural studies. It will also be of value to those interested in the novel as a political and aesthetic form.

Patricia McKee demonstrates that Richardson, Eliot, and James see disorderliness and indeterminacy in the human self, human relations, and literature as primary sources of meaningfulness. The relationships these novels portray as most satisfying are unsettled and unsettling, interfering with rather than contributing to social stability.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Reading Constellations uses Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history to examine four canonical Victorian novels by Dickens, Hardy, and James. Throughout its chapters, the monograph deploys the dialectical notion of the "constellation" to read moments in novels in which past and present interpenetrate and the ways these writers open out the representation of the city to new modes of articulation and-through narrative perception- the reader's perception of the phenomena of the city, its place as the exemplar of modernity, and the ways in which it determines subjectivity.

"Public and Private "was first published in 1997. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This groundbreaking work examines the emergent and fluctuating relationship between the public and private social spheres of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By assessing novels such as Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and Jane Austen's "Emma" through the lens of the social theories of Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault, Patricia McKee presents a fresh and highly original contribution to literary studies.

McKee explores the themes of production and consumption as they relate to gender and class throughout the works of many of the most influential novels of the age including Tobias Smollett's "Humphry Clinker," Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto," "Emma," "Frankenstein," Anthony Trollope's "Barchester Towers," Charles Dickens's "Little Dorrit" and "The Old Curiosity Shop," Mrs. Henry Wood's "East Lynne," and Thomas Hardy's "The Return of the Native."

McKee analyzes portrayals of a society in which abstract idealism belonged to knowledgeable, productive men and the realm of ignorance was left to emotional, consuming women and the uneducated. She traces the various ways British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries worked to reform this social experience. Topics include Dickens's attack on the bureaucratic use of knowledge to maintain the status quo; the function of antiprogressive depictions of knowledge in Trollope, Shelley, and Hardy; and Austen's characterization of the protagonist Emma as an exception in a society that denied women's productive use of knowledge.

Offering a sharp challenge to theorists who have charted a linear division of public and private experience, McKee highlights the unexpected configurations of the emergence of the public and private spheres and the effect of knowledge distribution across class and gender lines.

Patricia McKee is professor of English at Dartmouth College. She is the author of "Heroic Commitment in Richardson, Eliot, and James" (1986).

In "Producing American Races" Patricia McKee examines three authors who have powerfully influenced the formation of racial identities in the United States: Henry James, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. Using their work to argue that race becomes visible only through image production and exchange, McKee illuminates the significance that representational practice has had in the process of racial construction.
McKee provides close readings of six novels--James's "The Wings of the Dove" and "The Golden Bowl," Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" and "Light in August," and Morrison's "Sula" and "Jazz"--interspersed with excursions into Lacanian and Freudian theory, critical race theory, epistemology, and theories of visuality. In James and Faulkner, she finds, race is represented visually through media that highlight ways of seeing and being seen. Written in the early twentieth century, the novels of James and Faulkner reveal how whiteness depended on visual culture even before film and television became its predominant media. In Morrison, the culture is aural and oral--and often about the absence of the visual. Because Morrison's African American communities produce identity in nonvisual, even anti-visual terms, McKee argues, they refute not just white representations of black persons as objects but also visual orders of representation that have constructed whites as subjects and blacks as objects.
With a theoretical approach that both complements and transcends current scholarship about race--and especially whiteness--"Producing American Races" will engage scholars in American literature, critical race theory, African American studies, and cultural studies. It will also be of value to those interested in the novel as a political and aesthetic form.

Patricia McKee demonstrates that Richardson, Eliot, and James see disorderliness and indeterminacy in the human self, human relations, and literature as primary sources of meaningfulness. The relationships these novels portray as most satisfying are unsettled and unsettling, interfering with rather than contributing to social stability. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.