Reading rape : the rhetoric of sexual violence in American literature and culture, 1790-1990 / Sabine Sielke.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-232) and index.

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. 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. 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 -- 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 study 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. Challenging readings of rape.

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.

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