The Art of Retreat: Domestic Romanticisms in the Early United States

Authors

• Laurel V. Hankins

Files

Publication Date

5-13-2025

Description

The political and cultural fantasy of home as a retreat from the pressures of the world first emerged in the U.S. alongside two major nineteenth-century literary movements: Romanticism and domestic fiction. Upending accepted gendered narratives from this period, The Art of Retreat posits that these movements originated from a domestic culture already in transition, in which home was frequently a more complicated site of self-interested pleasure, coerced labor, creole social reproduction, homosocial intimacy, bachelor whimsy, petty tyranny, racial abuse, and transgender capacity. The early national periodicals, sketches, and novels examined here lend themselves to this interpretation. Hankins argues that the literary tradition emerging from these decades—one that aligned creative genius with domestic retreat—reminds us that a politics that appeals to private feeling must reckon with new interpretations of labor, kinship, and reform in exchange for the promise of consensual citizenship.

Keywords

Charles Brockden Brown, James Kirke Paulding, Washington Irving, William Irving, Salmagundi, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, Theodore Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, Harriet E. Wilson, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, American Romanticism, Domestic, Domestic retreat, Domesticity, Domestic fiction, Domestic ideology, Nineteenth Century American Literature, Early American Literature, Gender roles, Gendered spaces, Work from home, #WFH, Household, A Literary Wife, Domestic labor, Early American novel, Early American periodical, Nancy F. Cott, Amy Dru Stanley, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Female Poets of America, Woldwinite, Christopher Castiglia, Virginia Jackson, Christopher Looby, Cindy Weinstein, Shirley Samuels, Michael Warner, Karen Weyler, The Art of Retreat, aesthetic possibilities, gendered associations, early United States fiction, aesthetic retreat, diverse authors, gender binary, political fictions, private sphere, transcendent private life, domestic sphere, eighteenth century, nineteenth century, space of labor, space of retreat, liberal narrative, autonomous private life, consensual citizenship, literary culture, early national periodicals, sketches, novels, sociable intimacy, political affiliation, literary public sphere, material conditions, privileged escapism, ideological capitulation

Rights

© 2025 by Laurel V. Hankins

Language

eng

ISBN

9781684485628