Intimacy In America: Dreams Of Affiliation In Antebellum LiteratureU of Minnesota Press - 229 pages 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 in a feeling of belonging shared among diverse and scattered strangers. Reading seminal works by Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt 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 assumed 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 created an imaginary fraternity that symbolized citizenship, the ownership of property, and an affinity between strangers, which 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. Intimacy in America gives us a new perspective on the national meanings of race and sex in American literature, as well as on the still-current dream of American-ness as an impassioned relation to far-flung, anonymous others. |
Contents
1 | |
Race and the Civics of SelfRelation | 25 |
Poe Pedophilia and the Logic of Slavery | 59 |
Nationalism Sodomy and Whiteness in MobyDick | 91 |
Intimacy and Nationality in Whitman | 127 |
Other editions - View all
Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature Peter Coviello No preview available - 2005 |
Common terms and phrases
affective affiliation Amer American Literature American nationality anonymous antebellum antebellum nation argue attachment authors bond Calamus called chapter citizens citizenship civic conceptual course critical Culture death Democratic dependence describe desire destiny distinction Dorr Edgar Allan Poe erotic Essays Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick exactly F. O. Matthiessen fact feeling figures Foucault free black gender homosexual House of Usher human ideal identification imagined intimate nationality Ishmael Jefferson kind labor labor power language Lauren Berlant Leaves of Grass less Library of America literary nationalism Manifest Destiny meaning Melville Melville's Moby-Dick morbidity mutuality narrative narrator nationalist nature novel Oxford University Press particular person phrenological poems poet poet's Poetry political precisely promise Queequeg race racial nationalism relation remarks republic republican rhetorical seems self-relation sense sentimental sexual slave slavery social story suggest sympathy tion turn Walt Whitman Whale Winthrop York Young America