Introduction: battle with the world: theorizing same-sex desire in antebellum American literature -- Phallic images: Fuller, Lacan, and gender politics -- Ligeia's lament: femininity and the erotics of race -- New girls and bandit brides: female narcissism and lesbian desire in Fuller's Summer on the lakes -- No country for melancholy young men: mourning and hypocrisy -- In Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym -- American shudders: race, representation, and sodomy in Redburn -- Hester is burning: desire and gendered grief in The scarlet letter
Expanding our understanding of the possibilities and challenges inherent in the expression of same-sex desire, Greven identifies a pattern of what he calls 'gender protest' in the writings of Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. As Greven shows, antebellum authors took up the taboo subjects of same-sex desire and female sexuality and were adept in their use of a variety of rhetorical means for expressing the inexpressible
