In this compelling study, Hankins reconceptualizes domestic retreat as a speculative fiction produced by a host of figures not commonly associated with the domestic, including cosmopolitans, whimsical bachelors, gender non-conformists, and spiritualists. A surprising and beautifully written argument about the fantasies of the public-private divide that still structure our ideas of work and home today. -- Sarah Blackwood * author of The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States * "The Art of Retreat is an exciting reconsideration of the development of domestic fiction in the United States. By shifting attention to an early nineteenth-century moment when ideas of private retreat were unsettled and varied, Hankins uncovers the myriad aesthetic possibilities of domestic retreat that have been overlooked due to a tacit reliance on the more narrow, gendered conception of domesticity that became dominant later in the century. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the early history of American fiction." -- Thomas Koenigs * author of Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States * "The Art of Retreat disentangles the romance and romanticism from nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Cogently situating her argument in a rich theoretical and historical landscape, Hankins's capacious understanding of domestic retreat challenges the primacy of the marriage plot and its production of disciplined subjects, instead revealing the domestic as a site for speculation and experimentation." -- Karen A. Weyler * author of Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America * "The Art of Retreat offers an important and thoroughgoing re-account of the relationship between domestic retreat and the literary movements of romanticism and domestic fiction in the nineteenth-century United States. Tracing a cultural moment of transition for envisioning domestic retreat, Laurel Hankins challenges gendered critical narratives about the private sphere that have consolidated around both movements, and, in expanding the category of domestic fiction, demonstrates a wide range of alternatives for imagining retreat." -- Michelle Sizemore * author of American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary World *
