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Interior States
Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States
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Christopher Castiglia
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Edited by:
Donald E. Pease
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2008
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
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Acknowledgments
ix -
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Introduction. Interiority and the Problem of Misplaced Democracy
1 -
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1. ‘‘Matters of Internal Concern’’: Federal Affect and the Melancholy Citizen
17 -
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2. Bad Associations: Sociality, Interiority, Institutionalism
60 -
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3. Abolition’s Racial Interiors and White Civic Depth
101 -
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4. Ardent Spirits: Intemperate Sociality and the Inner Life of Capital
136 -
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5. Anxiety, Desire, and the Nervous State
168 -
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6. Between Consciousness and Revolution: Romanticism and Racial Interiority
216 -
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7. ‘‘I Want My Happiness!’’ Alienated Affections, Queer Sociality, and the Marvelous Interiors of the American Romance
256 -
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Epilogue. Humanism without Humans: The Possibilities of Post-Interior Democracy
294 -
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Notes
305 -
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References
351 -
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Index
363
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 11, 2008
eBook ISBN:
9780822389248
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
400
eBook ISBN:
9780822389248
Audience(s) for this book
Professional and scholarly;
