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:

1 online resource (243 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Reading seminal works by Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman, Peter Coviello traces these writers' ambivalences about the idea of an intimate nationality, revealing how race and sexuality were used as vehicles for an assumed coherence. Intimacy in America gives us a new perspective on the dream of Americanness as a relation to 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:

Description based upon print version of record.

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

ISBN:

0-8166-9613-6

OCLC:

476095725