The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Stacey Margolis

Published by Duke University Press 2005

The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Stacey Margolis
Edited by: Donald E. Pease

In the series New Americanists

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822386674

Overview
Contents

About this book

Challenges the familiar way of reading a major strain of 19th century American literature. Rather than seeing this strain as preoccupied with a subject's inner mental life, it shows that subjects can only be understood, and understand themselves, through

Author / Editor information

Stacey Margolis is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Utah.

Reviews

“This book places Stacey Margolis at the forefront of a generation of scholars intent on challenging the old divisions that continue to shape the study of American literature. Her unique contribution is to problematize a number of these divisions by showing how consistently post–Civil War fiction crossed the line distinguishing private interiority from social life and reversed the causal relationship between private intentions and public effects. Rather than rush to the Foucauldian conclusion that surveillance can only mean social regulation of personal desire, Margolis pieces together from American writing a model of self-regulation that insists how we appear in the eyes of our social cohort can and should shape how we feel and act. Formulating a liberal subject whose innermost thoughts thus come from outside itself, she not only works across historical and discursive boundaries that would stall most readers but with remarkable precision she also accounts for the formal differences among genres and authors. I believe Margolis’s book will change the way we read nineteenth-century American literature.”—Nancy Armstrong, Brown University

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: The Limits of Privacy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part One. Discipline and Punish
1. The Blithedale Romance and Other Tales of Association Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
2. The Rules of the Game: Punishment in The Wide Wide World Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	51
Part Two. Race and the Law
3. Huckleberry Finn; or, Consequences Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	81
4. The Veil of Cedars: Charles Chesnutt and Conversion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	107
Part Three. The Public Life
5. Addiction and the Ends of Desire Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
6. Homo-Formalism: Analogy in The Sacred Fount Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	231

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 246

eBook

Published: May 13, 2005
ISBN: 9780822386674