Intimacy and Family in Early American Writing / Erica Burleigh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Burleigh, Erica, 1973- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--Revolutionary period, 1775-1783--History and criticism.

American literature--1783-1850--History and criticism.

Communities in literature.

Intimacy (Psychology) in literature.

Families in literature.

Physical Description:

x, 209 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Summary:

Through the prism of intimacy, Erica Burleigh sheds light on eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century American texts. Drawing on the early periodical press, American writers used representations of intimacy to re-describe political union and Americanness as more than a product of geography or legislation. Writers in the young Republic worked through ways to understand the grounding of individual and communal intimate bonds, such as shared secrets, moral agreement, spatial proximity, reciprocal obligation, and universalism. Among these analogical devices, the trope of the family recurred to produce volatile and contradictory images-both intimately familiar and frighteningly alienating-through which early American writers and readers encountered and responded to upheavals in their cultural landscape. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Discursive Intimacy: Franklin Reads the Spectator with Bifocals 13

2 "Regular Love," Incest, and Intimacy in The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette 45

3 Incommensurate Equivalences: Genre, Representation, and Equity in Clam Howard and Jane Talbot 69

4 Sisters in Arms: Incest, Miscegenation, and Sacrifice in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie 99

5 "Mangled and Bleeding" Facts: Proslavery Novels and the Temporality of Sentiment 125.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9781137404077

1137404078

OCLC:

869065248