The rise of the middle class in Europe in the eighteenth century, culminating in the French Revolution, resulted in a bourgeois ideology that dominated in the nineteenth century and beyond. Men and women became clearly defined in terms of the widening distinction between public and private spaces in an increasingly commercialized society, and the former feudal hierarchy was largely replaced by a hierarchy based on sex/gender. The emerging economic division of "home" and "world" also translated into mental, emotional, and sexual differences: men became aligned with activity and rationality, their function was defined as cultural, whereas women were seen as passive and emotional and were defined through marriage and family.

In her novel Hagar's Daughter, African American feminist Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins imagines her black female characters as looking back to and claiming cross-racial, gendered legacies in the process of forming their own identities, from Hagar Sargeant's dreaming of white colonial dames to Venus Johnson's militant transvestism. In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton draws from the exegetical grouping of Judaism, femininity, and sexuality in the persons of Simon Rosedale and Lily Bart to reexamine Old New York's puritanical insistence upon its citizens' moral and physical inviolability.

Journal: Annals of Scholarship
Title: Reading the World of Big Data
Contact Emails: miller@gsu.edu, ogatta1@student.gsu.edu

Endless forms most beautiful: Science in 19th Century American Literature

I would like to propose a panel of papers that explores the role of science (rather than technology) in 19th century American literature for the 23rd Annual American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco, CA.