Book Cake Celebration
The Provost’s Office and the Office of Research and Innovation invite you to our inaugural Book Cake Celebration.
Dr. Hankins is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Communication in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her book, The Art of Retreat, will be published in May 2025 by Bucknell University Press. The political and cultural fantasy of home as a retreat from the pressures of the world first emerged in the U.S. alongside two major nineteenth-century literary movements: Romanticism and domestic fiction. Upending accepted gendered narratives from this period, The Art of Retreat posits that these movements originated from a domestic culture already in transition, in which home was frequently a more complicated site of self-interested pleasure, coerced labor, creole social reproduction, homosocial intimacy, bachelor whimsy, petty tyranny, racial abuse, and transgender capacity. The early national periodicals, sketches, and novels examined here lend themselves to this interpretation. Hankins argues that the literary tradition emerging from these decades—one that aligned creative genius with domestic retreat—reminds us that a politics that appeals to private feeling must reckon with new interpretations of labor, kinship, andreform in exchange for the promise of consensual citizenship.
Board of Trustees conference room
Zeina Madeiros
508-999-8805
zmadeiros@umassd.edu
https://www.umassd.edu/research/excellence/events/umassd-book-cake-series/