The public life of privacy in nineteenth-century American literature
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The public life of privacy in nineteenth-century American literature
（New Americanists）
Duke University Press, 2005
- : cloth
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
HTTP:URL=http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip051/2004023364.html Information=Table of contents
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Stacey Margolis rethinks a key chapter in American literary history, challenging the idea that nineteenth-century American culture was dominated by an ideology of privacy that defined subjects in terms of their intentions and desires. She reveals how writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James depicted a world in which characters could only be understood-and, more importantly, could only understand themselves-through their public actions. She argues that the social issues that nineteenth-century novelists analyzed-including race, sexuality, the market, and the law-formed integral parts of a broader cultural shift toward understanding individuals not according to their feelings, desires, or intentions, but rather in light of the various inevitable traces they left on the world.Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthorne and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers' works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments-such as changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law-as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes, and unintended consequences-one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Limits of Privacy 1 Part 1: Discipline and Punish 1. The Blithedale Romance and Other Tales of Association 17 2. The Rules of the Game: Punishment in The Wide Wide World 51 Part 2: Race and the Law 3. Huckleberry Finn
- or, Consequences 81 4. The Veil of Cedars: Charles Chesnutt and Conversion 107 Part 3: The Public Life 5. Addiction and the Ends of Desire 141 6. Homo-Formalism: Analogy in The Sacred Fount 169 Notes 197 Index 231
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