Interior States

Castiglia Christopher Castiglia

Description

In Interior States Christopher Castiglia focuses on U.S. citizens' democratic impulse: their ability to work with others to imagine genuinely democratic publics while taking divergent views into account. Castiglia contends that citizens of the early United States were encouraged to locate this social impulse not in associations with others but in the turbulent and conflicted interiors of their own bodies. He describes how the human interior-with its battles between appetite and restraint, desire and deferral-became a displacement of the divided sociality of nineteenth-century America's public sphere and contributed to the vanishing of that sphere in the twentieth century and the twenty-first. Drawing insightful connections between political structures, social relations, and cultural forms, he explains that as the interior came to reflect the ideological conflicts of the social world, citizens were encouraged to (mis)understand vigilant self-scrutiny and self-management as effective democratic action.In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, as discourses of interiority gained prominence, so did powerful counter-narratives. Castiglia reveals the flamboyant pages of antebellum popular fiction to be an archive of unruly democratic aspirations. Through close readings of works by Maria Monk and George Lippard, Walt Whitman and Timothy Shay Arthur, Hannah Webster Foster and Hannah Crafts, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Castiglia highlights a refusal to be reformed or self-contained. In antebellum authors' representations of nervousness, desire, appetite, fantasy, and imagination, he finds democratic strivings that refused to disappear. Taking inspiration from those writers and turning to the present, Castiglia advocates a humanism-without-humans that, denied the adjudicative power of interiority, promises to release democracy from its inner life and to return it to the public sphere where U.S. citizens may yet create unprecedented possibilities for social action.

Sujets

• USA
• Literary theory
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 11 novembre 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822389248
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

interior states

new americanists

ASeriesEditedbyDonaldE.Pease

INTERIOR STATES

institutional consciousness and the inner life

of democracy in the antebellum united states

Christopher Castiglia

duke university press

DurhamandLondon

2008

∫2008 duke university press

All rights reserved. Printed in the United

States of America on acid-free paper$

Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan

Typeset in Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

appear on the last printed page of this book.

Tothememoryofmyfather,

JosephA.Castiglia

***

Andasever,withlove,toChris

contents

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7

.

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction.Interiority and the Problem of Misplaced Democracy 1

‘‘Matters of Internal Concern’’: Federal A√ect and the Melancholy Citizen 17

Bad Associations: Sociality, Interiority, Institutionalism 60

Abolition’s Racial Interiors and White Civic Depth 101

Ardent Spirits: Intemperate Sociality and the Inner Life of Capital 136

Anxiety, Desire, and the Nervous State 168

Between Consciousness and Revolution: Romanticism and Racial Interiority 216

‘‘I Want My Happiness!’’ Alienated A√ections, Queer Sociality, and the Marvelous Interiors of the American Romance 256

Epilogue.Humanism without Humans: The Possibilities of Post-Interior Democracy 294

Notes 305

References 351

Index 363

acknowledgments

Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Loyola Center for Ethics and Social Justice, and a leave of absence from Loyola Univer- sity Chicago, enabled me to complete research for this book. I thank the sta√s of the Newberry Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Amherst College Robert Frost Library for their help in my research. Versions of chapter 3 appeared inylrremAaEureeratLiticanandAmerican LiteraryHistory, a version of chapter 6 appeared inInSearchofHahannarCstf (Perseus), and versions of chapter 7 appeared intonioThegdirbmaCnapmoCe Hawthorne,ntoitCrheTorNnoitfolaciidEThe House of the Seven Gables, and TheBlackwellCompaniontoHermanMelville. I benefited from the thought- ful criticism provided by anonymous readers for those volumes and by their editors—David Shields, Gordon Hutner, Rick Millington, Robert S. Levine, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Hollis Robbins, and Wyn Kelley—and gratefully ac- knowledge permission to reprint here. For inviting me to present portions of my work at conferences or at their home institutions, I am grateful to Steven Carl Arch, Gillian Brown, Pattie Cowell, Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, Teresa Goddu, Kristie Hamilton, Jack Ker- kering, Robert Levine, Trish Loughran, Chris Looby, Ellen McCallum, Rick Millington, Dana Nelson, Sam Otter, Don Pease, Eliza Richards, Karen Sanchez- Eppler, Laurie Shannon, Frank Shu√elton, Eric Slauter, Tim Sweet, and Al Young. My life in Chicago has been enriched by the friendship and conversation of George Chauncey, David and Lisa Chinitz, Lane Fenrich, Mary Finn, Verna Foster, Suzanne Gossett, Ron Gregg, Jay Grossman, Sharon Haar, Paul Jay, Tom and Noreen Kaminski, Jack Kerkering, Stephen Lapthisophon, Jules Law, Karen Lebergott, Mary Mackay, Je√ Masten, Gerry Reed, Mary Kay Reed, Harry Samuels, Moe Taylor, John Vincler, Wendy Wall, Joyce and Jerry Wexler, and Edward Wheatley. I owe a special thanks to Lynne Simon, who helped me escape the inner life and rediscover the pleasures of friendship. No aspect of my life during the writing of this book has been as stimulating as the conversations