Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States

Christopher Castiglia

Published by Duke University Press 2008

Interior States

Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States

Christopher Castiglia
Edited by: Donald E. Pease

In the series New Americanists

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822389248

Overview
Contents

About this book

Explores changing forms of interiority as produced in relation to the state in nineteenth century America and the current day.

Author / Editor information

Christopher Castiglia is Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst and a co-editor of Walt Whitman’s temperance novel Franklin Evans; or, the Inebriate, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

“Interior States rethinks the relation of identity and democracy in a dazzling exercise of literary criticism, social history, and political theory. Christopher Castiglia shows how the federal practice of democracy, in combination with developing institutions, did not squash so much as misplace democracy, relocating its performance from the sociality of exchange between citizens into the personal, bodily interior. Our nervous management of our own discordant identities sidetracks us from a richer, more inventively dissensual democratic practice. Castiglia explores a rich, interdisciplinary nineteenth-century archive that imagines alternative democracies and challenges readers to unfetter their imaginations in the service of more pleasurable, ‘post-interior’ democratic association.”—Dana D. Nelson, co-editor of Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics

“This book combines scope and depth in a way that will remind readers of some of the classics—F. O. Matthiessen, Leo Marx, Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins. In a book propelled by wonderful writing, Christopher Castiglia illuminates the extent to which the self-declared greatest democracy of world history has struggled to be democratic institutionally. His call for a ‘post-interior humanism’ gains real urgency from an account of a centuries-old impasse in American life that readers will remember long after they have finished the book.”—Christopher Newfield, author of The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction. Interiority and the Problem of Misplaced Democracy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. ‘‘Matters of Internal Concern’’: Federal Affect and the Melancholy Citizen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
2. Bad Associations: Sociality, Interiority, Institutionalism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	60
3. Abolition’s Racial Interiors and White Civic Depth Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	101
4. Ardent Spirits: Intemperate Sociality and the Inner Life of Capital Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	136
5. Anxiety, Desire, and the Nervous State Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	168
6. Between Consciousness and Revolution: Romanticism and Racial Interiority Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	216
7. ‘‘I Want My Happiness!’’ Alienated Affections, Queer Sociality, and the Marvelous Interiors of the American Romance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	256
Epilogue. Humanism without Humans: The Possibilities of Post-Interior Democracy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	294
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	305
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	351
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	363

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 378

eBook

Published: November 11, 2008
ISBN: 9780822389248