Inexpressible Privacy The Interior Life of Antebellum American
Literature Milette Shamir "Shamir dismantles the link that has been
forged by cultural historians and literary critics between
domesticity and privacy."--"American Historical Review" "Shamir
contributes centrally to historicist studies of feminine and
masculine subjectivity and the unevenly gender-freighted practices
of privacy and intimacy. The book will be noted for the large sweep
of its argument about the creation of masculine privacy, as well as
for the small details of its readings. Cogently argued, immediately
relevant to American studies scholarship in a variety of
directions, "Inexpressible Privacy" is extraordinarily topical and
innovative."--Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University "In what is
easily one of the best works of literary and social criticism this
reviewer has read in years, Shamir explores the inherent
contradictions in the American 'cult of privacy, ' tracing the
obsession back to the decades before the Civil War. . . .
Extraordinarily well written and researched, this volume confronts
key gender questions. . . . Essential."--"Choice" "Shamir's
arguments are very persuasive, and she surveys an expansive
cross-disciplinary range of writings on privacy--a great boon to
those interested in the subject."--"Journal of American History"
Selected by "Choice" magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for
2006 Few concepts are more widely discussed or more passionately
invoked in American public culture than that of privacy. What these
discussions have lacked, however, is a historically informed sense
of privacy's genealogy in U.S. culture. Now, Milette Shamir traces
this peculiarly American obsession back to the middle decades of
the nineteenth century, when our modern understanding of privacy
took hold. Shamir explores how various discourses, as well as
changes in the built environment, worked in tandem to seal,
regulate, and sanctify private spaces, both domestic and
subjective. She offers revelatory readings of texts by Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and other, less familiar antebellum
writers and looks to a wide array of sources, including
architectural blueprints for private homes, legal cases in which a
"right to privacy" supplements and exceeds property rights,
examples of political rhetoric vaunting the sacred inviolability of
personal privacy, and conduct manuals prescribing new codes of
behavior to protect against intrusion. Milette Shamir is Senior
Lecturer in American Literature at Tel Aviv University. 2005 296
pages 6 x 9 8 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3906-5 Cloth $65.00s 42.50
ISBN 978-0-8122-2023-0 Paper $22.50s 15.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-0424-7
Ebook $22.50s 15.00 World Rights Literature Short copy: Few
concepts are more widely discussed or more passionately invoked in
American public culture than the concept of privacy. Milette Shamir
traces the peculiarly American obsession with privacy back to the
middle decades of the nineteenth century, when our modern
understanding of the concept took hold.
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