Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature , livre ebook
247
pages
English
Ebooks
2005
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247
pages
English
Ebooks
2005
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Stacey Margolis rethinks a key chapter in American literary history, challenging the idea that nineteenth-century American culture was dominated by an ideology of privacy that defined subjects in terms of their intentions and desires. She reveals how writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James depicted a world in which characters could only be understood-and, more importantly, could only understand themselves-through their public actions. She argues that the social issues that nineteenth-century novelists analyzed-including race, sexuality, the market, and the law-formed integral parts of a broader cultural shift toward understanding individuals not according to their feelings, desires, or intentions, but rather in light of the various inevitable traces they left on the world.Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthorne and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers' works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments-such as changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law-as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes, and unintended consequences-one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self.
Voir
The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
new americanists
A Series Edited by Donald E. Pease
stacey margolis
Duke University Press
The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
durham and london2005
∫2005 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Designed by Erin Kirk New Typeset in Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.
Portions of chapters 3, 5, and 6 appeared, respectively, inPMLA(March 2001): 329– 43;High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction, edited by Marc Redfield and Janet Farrell Brodie (2002); andNovel: A Forum on Fiction(summer 2001); 391–410. I thank the MLA, the University of California Press, andNovelfor permission to reprint.
for andrew and charles
Contents
Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Limits of Privacy
1
part oneDiscipline and Punish 1.The Blithedale Romanceand Other Tales of Association 17 2. The Rules of the Game: Punishment inThe Wide Wide World51
part twoRace and the Law 3.Huckleberry Finn;or, Consequences 81 4. The Veil of Cedars: Charles Chesnutt and Conversion
part threeThe Public Life 5. Addiction and the Ends of Desire 141 6. Homo-Formalism: Analogy inThe Sacred Fount
Notes Index
197 231
169
107
Acknowledgments
This book began as my dissertation at the University of Chicago, was recon-ceived and substantially revised during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cal-ifornia Institute of Technology, and was completed at the University of Utah. I am grateful to the faculties of each of these institutions, especially my colleagues at Utah, who welcomed me warmly into the English department long before I became a full-fledged member. Teachers, friends, and col-leagues have made valuable contributions to this project; I am pleased to be able to thank them here: Lauren Berlant, Bill Brown, Gillian Brown, Eleanor Courtemanche, Stuart Culver, Kevin Gilmartin, Howard Horwitz, Cathy Jurca, Walter Benn Michaels, Donald Pease, Matt Potolsky, Cindy Weinstein, and Barry Weller. I would also like to thank my parents, Sheila and Steve Margolis, my sister, Robin Winer, and my in-laws, Harry and Margo Franta. My greatest debt, both personal and intellectual, is to Andrew Franta. Be-cause every page bears some trace of his remarkable intelligence, I dedicate this book to him, and to our son, Charles Magnus.
