Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

"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 postCivil 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 UniversityMargolis, Stacey is the author of 'Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature', published 2005 under ISBN 9780822335498 and ISBN 0822335492.