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Erotic Citizens - Sex and the Embodied Subject in the Antebellum Novel (Hardcover)
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Erotic Citizens - Sex and the Embodied Subject in the Antebellum Novel (Hardcover)
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What is the role of sex in the age of democratic beginnings?
Despite the sober republican ideals of the Enlightenment, the
literature of America's early years speaks of unruly, carnal
longings. Elizabeth Dill argues that the era's proliferation of
texts about extramarital erotic intimacy manifests not an anxiety
about the dangers of unfettered feeling, but an endorsement of it.
Uncovering the more prurient aspects of nation-building, Erotic
Citizens establishes the narrative of sexual ruin as a genre whose
sustained rejection of marriage acted as a critique of that which
traditionally defines a democracy: the social contract and the
sovereign individual. Through an examination of philosophical
tracts, political cartoons, frontispiece Illustrations,
portraiture, and the novel from the antebellum period, this study
reconsiders how the terms of embodiment and selfhood function to
define national belonging. From an enslaved woman's story of
survival in North Carolina to a philosophical treatise penned by an
English earl, the readings employ the trope of sexual ruin to tell
their tales. Such narratives advanced the political possibilities
of the sympathetic body, looking beyond the marriage contract as
the model for democratic citizenship. Against the cult of the
individual that once seemed to define the era, Erotic Citizens
argues that the most radical aspect of the Revolution was not the
invention of a self-governing body, but the recognition of a self
whose body is ungovernable.
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