...the Culture Wars. Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2005. xii + 272 pp. Cloth: $55.00.

Peter Coviello's Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature(2005) and Betsy Erkkila's Mixed Blood and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars (2005) explore the representation of interpersonal and group emotional attachment in classic American texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both Coviello and Erkkila suggest that queer, interracial, and illicit sexual desire underwrites literary depictions of sympathetic identification and group cohesiveness. Further, each argues that portrayals of non-normative erotic desire perform a complicated dance with racialist and nationalist sentiments. Connecting literary artistry with cultural imperatives, Coviello and Erkkila assert that many canonical American authors explore the idea that the true promise of democracy entails a radical expansion of sexual norms. Specifically, they suggest that sexual desires that dared not speak their names inform our classic authors' conceptions of white male political solidarity.

In Intimacy in America, Coviello uses the term "intimacy" to cover a lot of ground--from sexual desire to sympathetic friendship to community cohesiveness to nationalist belonging. Coviello invokes Foucault to claim that in the mid-nineteenth century--the period of his focus--traditional definitions of sexually-charged...

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