Interior States

“Interior States is a welcome reading of antebellum literature and politics. It challenges antebellum literary scholars to recalibrate key terms like ‘nation’ and ‘institution’ (and the relation between them), and to do so in light of a rejuvenated attention to literary form. Perhaps most importantly, Interior States insists on the need both to theorize the relation of psychology to politics and to historicize the emergence of this intertwining in the new nation.” - Justine S. Murison, Criticism

“[An] energetic study. . . . [T[he strength of the book ultimately resides in Castiglia’s literary analyses, which span from Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797) to well-known midcentury Transcendentalists including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. . . .” - Michael J. Drexler, Journal of American History

“Above all, Interior States shows, with wonderful clarity and scope, how the locale of social contestation came to be shifted, in America, from a volatile associational world to what was imagined into being as an unstable, nervous, divided, melancholy interior, ever in need of reform and management.” - Peter Coviello, MLQ

“Castiglia’s cultural criticism is exciting, suggesting illuminating applications to a host of antebellum texts beyond those he selected, including long-canonizedworks; Poe’s tales and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass come to mind. Theoretical implications also resonate to topics beyond American literary studiesdfor instance, reality TV, corporate personhood, conflict transformation, and the global overproduction of NGOs as placeholders for civil society.” - Janet Gray, Emotion, Space and Society

“Castiglia’s hybrid work crosses boundaries between fields as diverse as literature, politics, democratic philosophy, and psychology (individual and national). . . . Recommended.” - B. M. McNeal, Choice

“Christopher Castiglia’s Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States is noteworthy for its use of a Foucauldian critique of interiority to illustrate how privateness merges with the nascent ideals of the nation-state. Castiglia’s work will probably stand as the highwater mark for literary and cultural studies in this regard, bringing together the questions of personality, politics and affect (dis)orders of depression.” - Stephen Shapiro, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“Interior States rethinks the relation of identity and democracy in a dazzling exercise of literary criticism, social history, and political theory. Christopher Castiglia shows how the federal practice of democracy, in combination with developing institutions, did not squash so much as misplace democracy, relocating its performance from the sociality of exchange between citizens into the personal, bodily interior. Our nervous management of our own discordant identities sidetracks us from a richer, more inventively dissensual democratic practice. Castiglia explores a rich, interdisciplinary nineteenth-century archive that imagines alternative democracies and challenges readers to unfetter their imaginations in the service of more pleasurable, ‘post-interior’ democratic association.” - Dana D. Nelson, co-editor of Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics

“This book combines scope and depth in a way that will remind readers of some of the classics—F. O. Matthiessen, Leo Marx, Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins. In a book propelled by wonderful writing, Christopher Castiglia illuminates the extent to which the self-declared greatest democracy of world history has struggled to be democratic institutionally. His call for a ‘post-interior humanism’ gains real urgency from an account of a centuries-old impasse in American life that readers will remember long after they have finished the book.” - Christopher Newfield, author of The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America