The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

“Margolis outlines the impact of social interaction on the development of individual and collective national identity as reflected by select writers. Her book allows us to recognize the nineteenth century as a period in which American society shaped individuals, an insight that counters the Emersonian concept of the reflective, rugged individualist. The book provides an original interdisciplinary approach that would interest any nineteenth-century scholar or Americanist.” - Corinne Kopcik, Legacy

“One of the most compelling aspects of The Public Life of Privacy is its often daring synthesis between seemingly disparate discourses, issues, and texts. . . . [The book] challenge[s] us to question some of our deepest critical assumptions, asking us to rethink the formations and fault-lines of the privatized individual that we have come to take as a nearly transparent given in literature of the American nineteenth century.” - Ellen Weinauer, Nineteenth-Century Contexts

"With this book Margolis establishes a paradigm for a much wider study of US literature and its culture. Essential." - T. Bonner Jr., Choice

“This book places Stacey Margolis at the forefront of a generation of scholars intent on challenging the old divisions that continue to shape the study of American literature. Her unique contribution is to problematize a number of these divisions by showing how consistently post–Civil War fiction crossed the line distinguishing private interiority from social life and reversed the causal relationship between private intentions and public effects. Rather than rush to the Foucauldian conclusion that surveillance can only mean social regulation of personal desire, Margolis pieces together from American writing a model of self-regulation that insists how we appear in the eyes of our social cohort can and should shape how we feel and act. Formulating a liberal subject whose innermost thoughts thus come from outside itself, she not only works across historical and discursive boundaries that would stall most readers but with remarkable precision she also accounts for the formal differences among genres and authors. I believe Margolis’s book will change the way we read nineteenth-century American literature.” - Nancy Armstrong, Brown University