Intimacy in America : dreams of affiliation in antebellum literature / Peter Coviello.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Coviello, Peter.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Intimacy (Psychology) in literature.

National characteristics, American, in literature.

Difference (Psychology) in literature.

Interpersonal relations in literature.

Physical Description:

xii, 229 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2005]

Summary:

Nineteenth-century America was a sprawling new nation unmoored from precedent and the mainstays of European nationalism. In their search for nationality, Americans sought coherence instead in a sense of far-reaching mutuality, of connection between scattered strangers.

Reading seminal works by Jefferson, Poe, Melville, Stowe, and Whitman, Peter Coviello traces these writers' enthusiasms and their ambivalences about the dream of an intimate nationality, revealing how race and sexuality were used as vehicles for an imagined national coherence. As Coviello shows, race-and especially whiteness-functioned less as a form of identity than as a model of attachment and identification, a language of affiliation. Whiteness came to symbolize not only civic entitlement but a kind of affinity between strangers, which itself became entangled in the nation's evolving codes of sexuality. Bringing race theory and "white studies" into dialogue with questions of intimacy and affect, Coviello provides a practical rapprochement between historicist and psychoanalytic methodologies.

At once a work of race theory, American sexual history, and scrupulous literary scholarship, Intimacy in America gives us a new perspective on the still-current dream of Americanness as an impassioned relation to far-flung, anonymous others.

Contents:

Introduction : "What is it then between us?"

Intimate property : race and the civics of self-relation

The melancholy of little girls : Poe, pedophilia, and the logic of slavery

Bowels and fear : nationalism, sodomy, and whiteness in Moby-Dick

Loving strangers : intimacy and nationality in Whitman

Epilogue : nation mourns.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-217) and index.

ISBN:

0816643806

0816643814

OCLC:

56617357

Online:

Contributor biographical information