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Essays considering what it means to love art, culture, and people
in an age of accelerating disaster. This is a book about loving
things-books, songs, people-in the shadow of a felt, looming
disaster. Through lyrical, funny, heart-wrenching essays, Peter
Coviello considers pieces of culture across a fantastic range,
setting them inside the vivid scenes of friendship, dispute,
romance, talk, and loss, where they enter our lives. Alongside him,
we reencounter movies like The Shining, shows like The Sopranos;
videos; poems; novels by Sam Lipsyte, Sally Rooney, and Paula Fox;
as well as songs by Joni Mitchell, Gladys Knight, Steely Dan,
Pavement, and the much-mourned saint of Minneapolis, Prince.
Navigating an overwhelming feeling that Coviello calls
"endstrickenness," he asks what it means to love things in
calamitous times, when so much seems to be shambling toward
collapse. Balancing comedy and anger, exhilaration and sorrow,
Coviello illuminates the strange ways the things we cherish help us
to hold on to life and to its turbulent joys. Is There God after
Prince? shows us what twenty-first-century criticism can be, and
how it might speak to us, in a time of ruin, in an age of "Last
Things."
From the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century
Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population
deranged--socially, sexually, even racially--by the extravagances
of belief they called "religion." Make Yourselves Gods offers a
counter-history of early Mormon theology and practice, tracking the
Saints from their emergence as a dissident sect to their
renunciation of polygamy at century's end. Over these turbulent
decades, Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals,
refugees, anti-imperialists, colonizers, and, eventually, reluctant
monogamists and enfranchised citizens. Reading Mormonism through a
synthesis of religious history, political theology, native studies,
and queer theory, Peter Coviello deftly crafts a new framework for
imagining orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in
nineteenth-century America. What emerges is a story about the
violence, wild beauty, and extravagant imaginative power of this
era of Mormonism--an impassioned book with a keen interest in the
racial history of sexuality and the unfinished business of American
secularism.
Vineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel.
Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades
following his epic Gravity’s Rainbow, it was initially regarded
as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the
oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of thinking about
Pynchon’s writing and about how we read and how we live in the
rough currents of history. Beginning with his early besotted
encounters with Vineland, Coviello reads Pynchon’s offbeat novel
of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite summer of 1984 as a
delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work of heartsick
fury and political grief: a portrait of the hard afterlives of
failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a
roving meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of
friendship, the fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the
sentence and the police, Coviello argues that Vineland is among the
most abundant and far-sighted of late-century American excursions
into novelistic possibility. Departing from visions of Pynchon as
the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he discloses an author
far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon’s harmonizing of
joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a model
for thinking through our catastrophic present.
Honorable Mention for the 2014 MLA Alan Bray Memorial Award
Finalist for the 2013 LAMBDA LGBT Studies Book Award In
nineteenth-century America-before the scandalous trial of Oscar
Wilde, before the public emergence of categories like homo- and
heterosexuality-what were the parameters of sex? Did people
characterize their sexuality as a set of bodily practices, a form
of identification, or a mode of relation? Was it even something an
individual could be said to possess? What could be counted as
sexuality? Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in
Nineteenth-Century America provides a rich new conceptual language
to describe the movements of sex in the period before it solidified
into the sexuality we know, or think we know. Taking up authors
whose places in the American history of sexuality range from the
canonical to the improbable-from Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and
James to Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick
Douglass, and Mormon founder Joseph Smith-Peter Coviello delineates
the varied forms sex could take in the lead-up to its captivation
by the codings of "modern" sexuality. While telling the story of
nineteenth-century American sexuality, he considers what might have
been lostin the ascension of these new taxonomies of sex: all the
extravagant, untimely ways of imagining the domain of sex that,
under the modern regime of sexuality, have sunken into muteness or
illegibility. Taking queer theorizations of temporality in
challenging new directions, Tomorrow's Parties assembles an archive
of broken-off, uncreated futures-futures that would not come to be.
Through them, Coviello fundamentally reorients our readings of
erotic being and erotic possibility in the literature of
nineteenth-century America.
An curious gem of 19th-century gothic fiction Cecil Dreeme is one
of the queerest American novels of the 19th century. This edition,
which includes a new introduction contextualizing the sexual
history of the period and queer longings of the book, brings a
rare, almost forgotten, sensational gothic novel set in New York's
West Village back to light. Published posthumously in 1861, the
novel centers on Robert Byng, a young man who moves back to New
York after traveling abroad and finds himself unmarried and
underemployed, adrift in the heathenish dens of lower Manhattan.
When he takes up rooms in "Chrysalis College"-a thinly veiled
version of the 19th-century New York University building in
Washington Square-he quickly finds himself infatuated with a young
painter lodging there, named Cecil Dreeme. As their friendship
grows and the novel unfolds against the backdrop of the bohemian
West Village, Robert confesses that he "loves Cecil with a love
passing the love of women." Yet, there are dark forces at work in
the form of the sinister and magnetic Densdeth, a charismatic
figure of bad intention, who seeks to ensnare Robert for his own.
Full of romantic entanglements, mistaken identity, blackmail, and
the dramas of temptation and submission, Cecil Dreeme is a gothic
novel at its finest. Poetically written-with flashes of Walt
Whitman, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde-Cecil Dreeme is an early
example of that rare bird, a queer novel from the 19th century.
An curious gem of 19th-century gothic fiction Cecil Dreeme is one
of the queerest American novels of the 19th century. This edition,
which includes a new introduction contextualizing the sexual
history of the period and queer longings of the book, brings a
rare, almost forgotten, sensational gothic novel set in New York's
West Village back to light. Published posthumously in 1861, the
novel centers on Robert Byng, a young man who moves back to New
York after traveling abroad and finds himself unmarried and
underemployed, adrift in the heathenish dens of lower Manhattan.
When he takes up rooms in "Chrysalis College"-a thinly veiled
version of the 19th-century New York University building in
Washington Square-he quickly finds himself infatuated with a young
painter lodging there, named Cecil Dreeme. As their friendship
grows and the novel unfolds against the backdrop of the bohemian
West Village, Robert confesses that he "loves Cecil with a love
passing the love of women." Yet, there are dark forces at work in
the form of the sinister and magnetic Densdeth, a charismatic
figure of bad intention, who seeks to ensnare Robert for his own.
Full of romantic entanglements, mistaken identity, blackmail, and
the dramas of temptation and submission, Cecil Dreeme is a gothic
novel at its finest. Poetically written-with flashes of Walt
Whitman, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde-Cecil Dreeme is an early
example of that rare bird, a queer novel from the 19th century.
Vineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel.
Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades
following his epic Gravity’s Rainbow, it was initially regarded
as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the
oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of thinking about
Pynchon’s writing and about how we read and how we live in the
rough currents of history. Beginning with his early besotted
encounters with Vineland, Coviello reads Pynchon’s offbeat novel
of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite summer of 1984 as a
delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work of heartsick
fury and political grief: a portrait of the hard afterlives of
failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a
roving meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of
friendship, the fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the
sentence and the police, Coviello argues that Vineland is among the
most abundant and far-sighted of late-century American excursions
into novelistic possibility. Departing from visions of Pynchon as
the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he discloses an author
far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon’s harmonizing of
joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a model
for thinking through our catastrophic present.
Essays considering what it means to love art, culture, and people
in an age of accelerating disaster. This is a book about
loving things—books, songs, people—in the shadow of a felt,
looming disaster. Through lyrical, funny, heart-wrenching essays,
Peter Coviello considers pieces of culture across a fantastic
range, setting them inside the vivid scenes of friendship, dispute,
romance, talk, and loss, where they enter our lives. Alongside him,
we reencounter movies like The Shining, shows like The
Sopranos; videos; poems; novels by Sam Lipsyte, Sally Rooney, and
Paula Fox; as well as songs by Joni Mitchell, Gladys Knight, Steely
Dan, Pavement, and the much-mourned saint of Minneapolis, Prince.
Navigating an overwhelming feeling that Coviello calls
“endstrickenness,” he asks what it means to love things in
calamitous times, when so much seems to be shambling toward
collapse. Balancing comedy and anger, exhilaration and sorrow,
Coviello illuminates the strange ways the things we cherish help us
to hold on to life and to its turbulent joys. Is There God after
Prince? shows us what twenty-first-century criticism can be, and
how it might speak to us, in a time of ruin, in an age of “Last
Things.”
Honorable Mention for the 2014 MLA Alan Bray Memorial Award
Finalist for the 2013 LAMBDA LGBT Studies Book Award In
nineteenth-century America-before the scandalous trial of Oscar
Wilde, before the public emergence of categories like homo- and
heterosexuality-what were the parameters of sex? Did people
characterize their sexuality as a set of bodily practices, a form
of identification, or a mode of relation? Was it even something an
individual could be said to possess? What could be counted as
sexuality? Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in
Nineteenth-Century America provides a rich new conceptual language
to describe the movements of sex in the period before it solidified
into the sexuality we know, or think we know. Taking up authors
whose places in the American history of sexuality range from the
canonical to the improbable-from Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and
James to Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick
Douglass, and Mormon founder Joseph Smith-Peter Coviello delineates
the varied forms sex could take in the lead-up to its captivation
by the codings of "modern" sexuality. While telling the story of
nineteenth-century American sexuality, he considers what might have
been lostin the ascension of these new taxonomies of sex: all the
extravagant, untimely ways of imagining the domain of sex that,
under the modern regime of sexuality, have sunken into muteness or
illegibility. Taking queer theorizations of temporality in
challenging new directions, Tomorrow's Parties assembles an archive
of broken-off, uncreated futures-futures that would not come to be.
Through them, Coviello fundamentally reorients our readings of
erotic being and erotic possibility in the literature of
nineteenth-century America.
In December of 1862, having read his brother's name in a casualty
list, Walt Whitman rushed from Brooklyn to the war front, where he
found his brother wounded but recovering. But Whitman also found
there a "new world," a world dense with horror and revelation.
Memoranda During the War is Whitman's testament to the anguish,
heroism, and terror of the Civil War. The book consists of journal
entries extending from Whitman's arrival on the front in 1862
through to the war's conclusion in 1865. Whitman details his
encounters with soldiers and doctors, meditates on particular
battles and on the meanings of the war for the nation, and recounts
his wordless though peculiarly intimate public exchanges with
President Lincoln, a man Whitman saw often on the streets of
Washington and by whom he was deeply fascinated. The book offers an
astounding amalgam of death portraits, anecdotes of battle, last
words, messages to distant loved ones, and remarkably restrained
and muted descriptions of pain, dismemberment, and dying--all of
it, however grim, suffused with Whitman's undiminished enthusiasm
and affection for these young soldiers. And throughout, we find
Whitman laboring with heroic determination to sustain and nourish
his once-ardent faith in America and American life, even as the
nation unleashed unprecedented violence upon itself.
Edited and introduced by Peter Coviello, the book also includes
Whitman's famous speech "The Death of Abraham Lincoln," selected
poems, and a letter to the parents of a deceased soldier. Memoranda
During the War is a powerful portrait of a nation at war written by
one of our greatest poets.
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