Interior States ：Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States ( 1 )

Publication subTitle ：Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States

Publication series ：1

Author： Christopher Castiglia  

Publisher： Duke University Press‎

Publication year： 2008

E-ISBN: 9780822389248

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780822342670

P-ISBN(Hardback):  9780822342441

Subject： I0 Literary Theory

Keyword： American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism., Politics and literature -- United States -- History -- 19th century., Democracy in literature., Self in literature., Democracy -- Psychological aspects., Democracy -- Philosophy., Affect (Psychology) -- Social aspects -- United States -- History -- 19th century.,Emotions -- Political aspects -- United States -- History -- 19th century., Emotions -- Social aspects -- History -- 19th century.

Language： ENG

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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 Melvi

Chapter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Interiority and the Problem of Misplaced Democracy

1 ‘‘Matters of Internal Concern’’: Federal Affect and the Melancholy Citizen

2 Bad Associations: Sociality, Interiority, Institutionalism

3 Abolition’s Racial Interiors and White Civic Depth

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

5 Anxiety, Desire, and the Nervous State

6 Between Consciousness and Revolution: Romanticism and Racial Interiority

‘‘I Want My Happiness!’’ Alienated Affections, Queer Sociality, and the Marvelous Interiors of the American Romance

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

Notes

References

Index

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