"The political and cultural fantasy of home as a retreat fromt he pressures of the world first emerged in the U.S. alongside two major nineteenth-century literary movements: Romanticism and domestic fiction. Upending accepted gendered naratives from thisperiod, The Art of Retreat posits that these movements originated from a domestic culture already in transition, in which home was frequently a more complicated site of self-interested pleasure, coerced labor, creole social reproduction, homosocial intimacy, bachelor whimsy, petty tyranny, racial abuse, and transgender capacity. The early national periodicals, sketches, and novels examined here lend themselves to this interpretation. Hankins argues that the literary tradition emerging from these decades--one that aligned creative genius with domestic retreat--reminds us that a politics that appeals to private feeling must reckon with new interpretations of labor, kinship, and reform in exchange for the promise of consensual citizenship."--
The political and cultural fantasy of home as a retreat from the pressures of the world first emerged in the U.S. alongside two major nineteenth-century literary movements: Romanticism and domestic fiction. Upending accepted gendered narratives from this period, The Art of Retreat posits that these movements originated from a domestic culture already in transition, in which home was frequently a more complicated site of self-interested pleasure, coerced labor, creole social reproduction, homosocial intimacy, bachelor whimsy, petty tyranny, racial abuse, and transgender capacity. The early national periodicals, sketches, and novels examined here lend themselves to this interpretation. Hankins argues that the literary tradition emerging from these decadesone that aligned creative genius with domestic retreatreminds us that a politics that appeals to private feeling must reckon with new interpretations of labor, kinship, and reform in exchange for the promise of consensual citizenship.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
The Art of Retreat examines the ideal of domestic retreat as it first emerges as a political and cultural fantasy in the early United States. Reconstructing a spectrum of alternative precedents to the familiar ideology of domesticity, this book upends our gendered narratives of nineteenth century literary culture.