Intimacy and Family in Early American Writing

Through the prism of intimacy, Erica Burleigh sheds light here on eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century American texts. Drawing on the early periodical press, American writers used representations of intimacy to redescribe political union and Americanness as more than a product of geography or legislation. Writers in the young Republic worked through ways to understand the grounding of individual and communal intimate bonds - such as shared secrets, moral agreement, spatial proximity, reciprocal obligation, and universalism. Among these analogical devices, the trope of the family recurred to produce volatile and contradictory images - both intimately familiar and frighteningly alienating - through which early American writers and readers encountered and responded to upheavals in their cultural landscape.