Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape -- CHAPTER ONE: Seduced and Enslaved: Sexual Violence in Antebellum American Literature and Contemporary Feminist Discourse -- "Rape Crisis" or "Crisis in Sexual Identity"? The Feminist Rhetoric of Rape -- "Guilty Passions" And "Foul Words": The Powers Of Seduction And The Racialization Of Sexual Violence -- The Deployment of Sexual Violence and the "Cult of Secrecy": Historicizing the Feminist Rhetoric of Rape -- CHAPTER TWO: The Rise of the (Black) Rapist and the Reconstruction of Difference -- or, "Realist" Rape -- "Black Claws into Soft White Throat" and Other Bestialities: Rapist Rhetoric, Rivalry, and Homosocial Desire in Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock, Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, and Frank Norris's McTeague -- "A Tender Lamb Snatched from the Jaws of a Hungry Wolf": Inversions of Rapist Rhetoric in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy -- "The One Crime" and "the Real 'One Crime'": Rape, Lynching, and Mimicry in Sutton E. Griggs's The Hindered Hand -- "A Thing Not to Be Faced": Rape as Robbery in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle -- "Unconscious Penetration": Manners, Money, and the Primitive Man in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth -- "The Kind We Can't Resist": The Lesson of William Vaughn Moody's A Sabine Woman -- CHAPTER THREE: Rape and the Artifice of Representation: Four Modernist Modes -- "Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled! Rumpled! Rummaged! Ransacked!": Styles and Hyperboles of Seduction, Rape, and Incest in Djuna Barnes's Ryder -- "That Little Hot Ball Inside You That Screams": Rape's Resistance to Representation, the Resistance to Rape, and the Transgression of Boundaries in William Faulkner's Sanctuary -- "Not What One Did to Women": Enacting Projections and Constructing the Racial Border in Richard Wright's Native Son.

Fighting "Forced Relationship": Rape and Manslaughter in Ann Petry's The Street -- CHAPTER FOUR: Voicing Sexual Violence, Repoliticizing Rape: Post-Modernist Narratives of Sexuality and Power -- "Mankind's Greatest Crime, Man's Inhumanity to Man": Chester Himes's A Case of Rape -- "Plain Black (Gender) Trouble": Intraracial Rape, Incest, And Other Family Feuds -- "Phantom Men" and "Zipless Fucks": Rape Fantasies and the Fictions of Female Desire -- "An Obscene Posture That No One Could Help": Sodomy, Male Anxiety, and the "Crisis of Homo/Heterosexual Definition" in James Dickey'S Deliverance -- AFTERWORD: Challenging Readings of Rape -- Notes -- Works Cited and Consulted -- Primary Texts -- Secondary Sources -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- Y.

Reading Rape examines how American culture talks about sexual violence and explains why, in the latter twentieth century, rape achieved such significance as a trope of power relations. Through attentive readings of a wide range of literary and cultural representations of sexual assault--from antebellum seduction narratives and "realist" representations of rape in nineteenth-century novels to Deliverance, American Psycho, and contemporary feminist accounts--Sabine Sielke traces the evolution of a specifically American rhetoric of rape. She considers the kinds of cultural work that this rhetoric has performed and finds that rape has been an insistent figure for a range of social, political, and economic issues. Sielke argues that the representation of rape has been a major force in the cultural construction of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and indeed national identity. At the same time, her acute analyses of both canonical and lesser-known texts explore the complex anxieties that motivate such constructions and their function within the wider cultural imagination. Provoked in part by contemporary feminist criticism, Reading Rape also challenges feminist positions on sexual violence by interrogating them as part of the history in which rape has been a convenient and conventional albeit troubling trope for other concerns and conflicts. This book teaches us what we talk about when we talk about rape. And what we're talking about is often something else entirely: power, money, social change, difference, and identity.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.