Intimacy and Family in Early American Writing [Hardcover]

Through the prism of intimacy, Burleigh sheds light on eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century American texts. This insightful study shows how the trope of the family recurred to produce contradictory images - both intimately familiar and frighteningly alienating - through which Americans responded to upheavals in their cultural landscape.Introduction: Intimacy, Integrity, Interdependence 1. Discursive Intimacy: Franklin Reads the Spectator with Bifocals 2. 'Regular Love,' Incest, and Intimacy in The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette 3. Incommensurate Equivalences: Genre, Representation, and Equity in Clara Howard and Jane Talbot 4. Sisters in Arms: Incest, Miscegenation, and Sacrifice in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie 5. 'Mangled and Bleeding' Facts: Proslavery Novels and the Temporality of Sentiment 6. Bibliography

[This book] balances informative synopses with provocative and carefully reasoned observations and conclusions . . . Recommended. - CHOICE

'Moving across a number of sophisticated theoretical and jurisprudential problems with great lucidity, Erica Burleigh's Intimacy and Family in Early American Writing returns to and reignites feminist debates about family figures in early American writing. The book engages a much more ambitious historical trajectory than similar works, demonstrating how debates about slavery repurposed an early national rhetoric of familial disunion, and nuancing our understanding of race in anti-abolitionist rhetoric. A fascinating and welcome intervention.' Jordan Alexander Stein, Assistant Professor of English, Fordham University, USA

Erica Burleigh is Assistant Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, USA.