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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 80
Page vii
... Nationalism, Sodomy, and Whiteness in Moby-Dick 91 4. Loving Strangers: Intimacy and Nationality in Whitman 127 Epilogue: NATION MOURNS 157 Notes 177 Index 219 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments in Ithaca, kick-started ...
... Nationalism, Sodomy, and Whiteness in Moby-Dick 91 4. Loving Strangers: Intimacy and Nationality in Whitman 127 Epilogue: NATION MOURNS 157 Notes 177 Index 219 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments in Ithaca, kick-started ...
Page 1
... nationalist panegyric of the previous year but instead an attack—an uncommonly vitriolic attack—on the dreadful state of American governance. “Today, of all the persons in public ofWce in These States,” he writes, “not one in a thousand ...
... nationalist panegyric of the previous year but instead an attack—an uncommonly vitriolic attack—on the dreadful state of American governance. “Today, of all the persons in public ofWce in These States,” he writes, “not one in a thousand ...
Page 2
... nationalism, which retains all its stridency and conviction, simply opposes itself to the state, and in particular to the way that state has seen to the systematic betrayal of a better America, “the real America.” His is the story, then ...
... nationalism, which retains all its stridency and conviction, simply opposes itself to the state, and in particular to the way that state has seen to the systematic betrayal of a better America, “the real America.” His is the story, then ...
Page 3
... nationalist Martin Delaney, and of course Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose anti-state fervor found at moments a pitch of biblical apocalypticism that fully matched Whitman's venom.3 And though the local reasons for such political discontent ...
... nationalist Martin Delaney, and of course Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose anti-state fervor found at moments a pitch of biblical apocalypticism that fully matched Whitman's venom.3 And though the local reasons for such political discontent ...
Page 4
... nationalists a way to corroborate the dream of an America made coherent not by the decrees of the state but by that peculiar bondedness that joins its dispersed and mutually anonymous citizens, fusing them into what we might call an ...
... nationalists a way to corroborate the dream of an America made coherent not by the decrees of the state but by that peculiar bondedness that joins its dispersed and mutually anonymous citizens, fusing them into what we might call an ...
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 |
NATION MOURNS | 157 |
Notes | 177 |
Index | 219 |
Other editions - View all
Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature Peter Coviello No preview available - 2005 |
Common terms and phrases
affective afWliation agnosticism Allan Poe Amer American Literature American nationality anonymous antebellum antebellum nation attachment authors bond Calamus called chapter citizens citizenship civic conceptual critical Culture death Democratic describe desire deWne deWnition difWcult distinction Dorr Edgar Allan Poe epistemology erotic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick F. O. Matthiessen fact feeling Foucault gender homosexual House of Usher human ideal identiWcation imagined intimate nationality Ishmael Jefferson kind labor labor power language Lauren Berlant Leaves of Grass less literary nationalism Manifest Destiny meaning Melville Melville’s Moby-Dick morbidity mutuality narrative narrator nationalist nature novel one’s Oxford University Press particular person phrenological Poe’s Poe’s writing poems poet poet’s Poetry political precisely promise Queequeg race racial nationalism relation republican rhetorical seems self-relation sense sentimental sexual slave slavery social speciWcally story suggest tion Walt Whitman Wgures Whale Winthrop Wnally Wrst York Young America
Popular passages
Page 38 - There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it : I have killed many : I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbor a thought that mine is the joy of fear.
Page 32 - I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it.
Page 41 - Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.
Page 64 - During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
Page 75 - As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the...
Page 75 - Not hear it? yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long — long — long — many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it — yet I dared not — oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am ! I dared not —• I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb ! Said I not that my senses were acute.
Page 163 - Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British Brethren We have warned them from Time to Time of attempts by their Legislature to extend an unwarrantable Jurisdiction over us...
Page 32 - ... the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.
Page 73 - ... altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me.
Page 187 - Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.