Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America

Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America

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Domestic Intimacies offers a wide-ranging, critical history of incest and its various prohibitions as they were defined throughout the nineteenth century. Historian Brian Connolly argues that at the center of these convergent anxieties and debates lay the idea of the liberal subject: an autonomous individual who acted on his own desires yet was tempered by reason, who enjoyed a life in public yet was expected to find his greatest satisfaction in family and home. Always lurking was the need to exercise personal freedom with restraint; indeed, the valorization of the affectionate family was rooted in its capacity to act as a bulwark against licentiousness. However it was defined, incest was thus not only perceived as a threat to social stability; it also functioned to regulate social relations—within families and between classes as well as among women and men, slaves and free citizens, strangers and friends. Domestic Intimacies overturns conventional histories of American liberalism by placing the fear of incest at the heart of nineteenth-century conflicts over public life and privacy, kinship and individualism, social contracts and personal freedom.

ISBN

9780812246216

Publication Date

2014

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Disciplines

History

Comments

https://usf-flvc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01FALSC_USF/1amem1q/alma99379699487306599

https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15247.html

Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America

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