Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

"This pioneering study about the intersection between short stories and the public discourse about mother-daughter relationships begins with the discovery and analysis of a "female sexual economy" in which mothers are pitted against daughters in a struggle to define a sexual identity, and moved on to consider the ways that class and race shape these conflicts. Sex, Race, and Family uses critical approaches offered by Irigaray, Bataille, and Bourdieu to highlight the conservative grain of modern American short fiction and illustrates new uses of theories developed in whiteness studies."--book jacket.