Description
Book SynopsisFew concepts are more widely discussed or more passionately invoked in American public culture than the concept of privacy. Milette Shamir traces the peculiarly American obsession with privacy back to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when our modern understanding of the concept took hold.
Trade Review"Shamir contributes centrally to historicist studies of feminine and masculine subjectivity and the unevenly gender-freighted practices of privacy and intimacy. The book will be noted for the large sweep of its argument about the creation of masculine privacy, as well as for the small details of its readings. Cogently argued, immediately relevant to American studies scholarship in a variety of directions,
Inexpressible Privacy is extraordinarily topical and innovative." * Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University *
"In what is easily one of the best works of literary and social criticism this reviewer has read in years, Shamir explores the inherent contradictions in the American 'cult of privacy,' tracing the obsession back to the decades before the Civil War. . . . Extraordinarily well written and researched, this volume confronts key gender questions. . . . Essential." *
Choice *
"Shamir's arguments are very persuasive, and she surveys an expansive cross-disciplinary range of writings on privacy-a great boon to those interested in the subject." *
Journal of American History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. Divided Plots: Gender Symmetry and the Architecture of Domestic Space
2. Dream Houses: Divided Interiority in Three Antebellum Short Stories
3. The Master's House Divided: Exposure and Concealment in Narratives of Slavery
4. Hawthorne's Romance and the Right to Privacy
5. Thoreau in Suburbia: Walden and the Liberal Myth of Private Manhood
6. "The Manliest Relations to Men": Thoreau on Privacy, Intimacy, and Writing
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
