Disappointment, or, Thoreau in love -- Whitman at war -- Coda : a little destiny -- Islanded : Jewett and the uncompanioned life -- What does the polygamist want? : Frederick Douglass, Joseph Smith, and marriage at the edges of the human -- Coda : unceremoniousness -- The tenderness of beasts : Hawthorne at Blithedale -- Made for love : Olive Chancellor, Henry James, and the Bostonians -- Coda : the turn
"Dazzling intelligence radiates here, out from sentences giving such pleasure, yielding the finest devotion I've seen to literature's own theoretical force. Coviello listens, carefully, brilliantly, for the flickerings, the liquid meanderings, all too easily explained as "sexual"--Or never even perceived at all. Here is a critic as joyful as Whitman, with his dark core fully afire."--Kathryn Bond Stockton, Distinguished Professor of English at University of Utah In nineteenth-century America-before the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde, before the public emergence of categories like homo- and
