Intimacy in America : dreams of affiliation in antebellum literature

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. Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Introduction: "What Is It Then between Us?"......Page 14 1. Intimate Property: Race and the Civics of Self-Relation......Page 38 2. The Melancholy of Little Girls: Poe, Pedophilia, and the Logic of Slavery......Page 72 3. Bowels and Fear: Nationalism, Sodomy, and Whiteness in Moby-Dick......Page 104 4. Loving Strangers: Intimacy and Nationality in Whitman......Page 140 Epilogue: NATION MOURNS......Page 170 Notes......Page 190 A......Page 232 C......Page 233 F......Page 234 I......Page 235 L......Page 236 M......Page 237 P......Page 238 R......Page 239 S......Page 240 W......Page 241 Y......Page 242 Reading seminal works by Jefferson, Poe, Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe & Whitman, Coviello traces the enthusiasisms of each writer & their ambivalences about the dream of an intimate nationality, revealing how race & sexuality were used as vehicles for an assumed national coherence