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Studies in American Fiction25 1 reader with future action. Part of the Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism series edited by Gary Scharnhorst, Chesnutt and Realism challenges traditional definitions ofrealism by carefully redefining its terms to circumscribe the many shifts in Chesnutt's writing career. Further, Simmons emphasizes the neglect of realism as a useful category for Chesnutt scholarship while remaining in conversation with pertinent scholarship on realism and race, including that of Joseph McElrath, Brook Thomas, William L. Andrews, and Kenneth Warren. In doing so he creates a portrait ofCharles Chesnutt that reflects his attentiveness to the moral and political power of literature and his commitment to realism in his depiction ofrace matters in American culture. Mary GetchellNortheastern University Coviello, Peter. Intimacyin America: Dreams ofAffiliation in Antebellum Literature. Minneapolis and London: Univ. ofMinnesota Press, 2005. xii + 229 pp. Cloth: $60.00. Paper: $20.00. Erkkila, Betsy. Mixed Blood and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. xii + 272 pp. Cloth: $55.00. Peter Coviello's Intimacyin America: Dreams ofAffiliation in AntebellumLiterature (2005) and Betsy Erkkila's MixedBloodandOtherCrosses: RethinkingAmerican 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 ofsympathetic identification and group cohesiveness. Further, each argues that portrayals ofnonnormative 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 ofdemocracy entails a radical expansion ofsexual norms. Specifically, they suggest that sexual desires that dared not speak their names inform our classic authors' conceptions ofwhite male political solidarity. In Intimacy in America, Coviello uses the term "intimacy" to cover a lot ofground—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 ofsexually-charged terms blurred and altered. The various shades 252Reviews of meanings gave texts such as Moby-Dick and Leaves ofGrass resonance in their time and continue to intrigue us today. Indeed, IntimacyinAmerica is most interesting not when addressing matters of nationality and race, but when confronting subjects long the source of speculation and titillation : Poe's pedophilia, the homoeroticism of Moby-Dick, and the masculine promiscuity of Whitman's "adhesiveness." Regarding Poe, Coviello begins at a familiar site: the frightening portrayals of adult gender erotics in stories such as "The Fall of the House of Usher." Drawing on poems such as "Annabel Lee," Coviello suggests that Poe found safer emotional ground depicting unconsummated relationships between men and young women. From this relatively solid beginning Coviello speculates about Poe's attitudes on race and nationalism. The estrangement between sexes, Coviello claims, furnishes the logic by which we can understand Poe's racism: "[A]s women are incontestably and absolutely different from men, so are whites absolutely different from blacks" (83). These forbidding boundary lines in place, Coviello asserts that Poe found nationalist sentiment among white males equally horrible, perhaps even impossible, to contemplate: "Poe has no register in which to describe any bond between persons—let alone a bond extending mysteriously between unsuspecting strangers—that is not fundamentally terrifying" (89). Thus, Coviello ends somewhat flatly, Poe's relative quiet on the literary andpoliticalnationalism issues that engrossedpeers such as Evert Duyckinck and William Gilmore Simms. Coviello raises the stakes when he turns to Melville. A chapter entitled "Bowels and Fear: Nationalism, Sodomy, and Whiteness in MobyDick ," reiterates arguments first made by D. H. Lawrence that Melville troubled antebellum beliefs in white supremacy. Coviello advances this argument by suggesting that Melville early in Moby-Dickexplores the notion that homosexual affinity might serve better than race consciousness to conceptualize a united citizenry. For evidence, Coviello cites Ishmael and Queequeg's odd friendship and the eroticized fraternity of the Pequod's crew. Coviello asserts, however, that Melville ultimately forecloses on this vision of sexually-charged male solidarity. Ahab's galvanizing of the crew to...

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