Acknowledgments -- The Conversation of "The Whole Family": Gender, Politics, and Aesthetics in Literary Tradition karen l. kilcup -- Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick: A Dialogue on Race, Culture, and Gender susanne opfermann -- Reconstructing Literary Genealogies: Frances E. W. Harper's and William Dean Howells's Race Novels m. giulia fabi -- Was Tom White? Stowe's Dred and Twain's "Pudd'nhead Wilson" judie newman -- Shaped by Readers: The Slave Narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs stephen matterson -- Body Politics and the Body Politic in William Wells Brown's "Clotel" and Harriet Wilson's "Our Nig" r. j. ellis -- Wild Semantics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Feminization of Edgar Allan Poe's Arabesque Aesthetics gabriele rippl -- Deepening Hues to Local Color: George Washington Cable and Sarah Barnwell Elliott aranzazu usandizaga -- "Sister Carrie" and "The Awakening": The Clothed, the Unclothed, and the Woman Undone janet beer -- Ladies Prefer Bonds: Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and the Money Novel claire preston -- Mining the West: Bret Harte and Mary Hallock Foote janet floyd -- My Banker and I Can Afford to Laugh! Class and Gender in Fanny Fern and Nathaniel Hawthorne alison m. j. easton -- Body/Rituals: The (Homo)Erotics of Death in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Terry Cooke, and Edgar Allan Poe ralph j. poole -- The Five Million Women of My Race: Negotiations of Gender in W. E. B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper hanna wallinger -- Woman Thinking: Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the American Scholar lindsey traub -- How Conscious Could Consciousness Grow? Emily Dickinson and William James susan manning -- Contributors -- Index.