Description
Book SynopsisChallenges 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 the production of public effects.
Trade Review“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
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
