Using black feminist theory and African American studies to read Victorian culture, "Impossible Purities" looks at the construction of Englishness as white, masculine, and pure and Americanness as black, feminine, and impure. Brody s readings of Victorian novels, plays, paintings, and science fiction reveal the impossibility of purity and the inevitability of hybridity in representations of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and race. She amasses a considerable amount of evidence to show that Victorian culture was bound inextricably to various forms and figures of blackness.
Opening with a...