Situation Critical

Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies

Max Cavitch, Brian Connolly (Herausgeber)

Buch | Softcover

304 Seiten

2024
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-3031-7 (ISBN)

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The contributors to Situation Critical argue for the continued importance of critique to early American studies, pushing back against both reductivist neo-empiricism and so-called postcritique. Bringing together essays by a diverse group of historians and literary scholars, editors Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly demonstrate that critique is about acknowledging that we are never simply writing better or worse accounts of the past, but accounts of the present as well. The contributors examine topics ranging from the indeterminacy of knowledge and history to Black speculative writing and nineteenth-century epistemology, the role of the unconscious in settler colonialism, and early American writing about masturbation, repression, religion, and secularism and their respective influence on morality. The contributors also offer vital new interpretations of major lines of thought in the history of critique-especially those relating to Freud and Foucault-that will be valuable both for scholars of early American studies and for scholars of the humanities and interpretive social sciences more broadly.

Contributors. Max Cavitch, Brian Connolly, Matthew Crow, John J. Garcia, Christopher Looby, Michael Meranze, Mark J. Miller, Justine S. Murison, Britt Rusert, Ana Schwartz, Joan W. Scott, Jordan Alexander Stein

Max Cavitch is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman. Brian Connolly is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Florida and the author of Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America.

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Situation Critical / Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly 1
I. Theory for Early America
1. Psychoanalysis and the Indeterminacy of History / Joan W. Scott 33
2. Foucault’s Oedipus / Michael Meranze 52
II. Subjects of Early America
3. Annoyances, Tolerable and Intolerable / Ana Schwartz 73
4. Michael Widdlesworth’s Queer Orthography / Christopher Looby 103
5. George Whitefield’s Sexual Character / Mark J. Miller 139
III. Fantasies of Realism
6. Secularism, Hypocrisy, and the Afterlives of Thomas Paine / Justine S. Murison 177
7. No Matter: Persisting Rationalisms in Antebellum Black Thought / Britt Rusert 202
8. Queering Abolition / Jordan Alexander Stein 223
IV. Power, Knowledge, Justice
9. Equality in the Time of Moby-Dick / Matthew Crow 241
10. Antebellum or Interbellum? / John J. Garcia 263
List of Contributors 287
Index 289

Erscheinungsdatum	22.02.2024
Zusatzinfo	8 illustrations
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	408 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-4780-3031-3 / 1478030313
ISBN-13	978-1-4780-3031-7 / 9781478030317
Zustand	Neuware