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Intimacy in America - Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Paperback)
Loot Price: R586
Discovery Miles 5 860
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Intimacy in America - Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Paperback)
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Loot Price R586
Discovery Miles 5 860
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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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.
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