Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism

This fine interdisciplinary study incorporates the history of the middle class, art, and literature as it historicizes the ways in which white famles participated in, produced, and benefited from Americans' ambivalent fascination with Japan and China and contributed to the feminization of American orientalism during the Gilded Age. Yoshihara's careful research and nuanced readings of multiple texts...is engaging and provocative, and her analysis of the intersections of gender and race is particularly insightful