Situation Critical

Max Cavitch is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman.Brian Connolly is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Florida and the author of Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America.

• Acknowledgments  viiIntroduction: Situation Critical / Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly  1I. Theory for Early America1. Psychoanalysis and the Indeterminacy of History / Joan W. Scott  332. Foucault’s Oedipus / Michael Meranze  52II. Subjects of Early America3. Annoyances, Tolerable and Intolerable / Ana Schwartz  734. Michael Widdlesworth’s Queer Orthography / Christopher Looby  1035. George Whitefield’s Sexual Character / Mark J. Miller  139III. Fantasies of Realism6. Secularism, Hypocrisy, and the Afterlives of Thomas Paine / Justine S. Murison  1777. No Matter: Persisting Rationalisms in Antebellum Black Thought / Britt Rusert  2028. Queering Abolition / Jordan Alexander Stein  223IV. Power, Knowledge, Justice9. Equality in the Time of Moby-Dick / Matthew Crow  24110. Antebellum or Interbellum? / John J. Garcia  263List of Contributors  287Index  289

In Situation Critical, Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly issue a rousing call for a return to critique, arguing for the importance of the study of early America to some of the most urgent questions of twenty-first-century life. Locating contemporary ideas about sovereignty, race, sexuality, justice, and power in the unsettled state of colonial and early national American culture, the essays collected here engage early America not as a stable ground or point of origin but rather as a particularly fertile site for a critical history, one that brings empirical and theoretical approaches into dynamic relation.” - Meredith L. McGill, Professor of English, Rutgers University “What an edifying delight to think along with the scholars gathered in Situation Critical, whose objects of analysis range from Puritan annoyance to Melvillean justice, queer possibility to secular rectitude, cultures of abolition to settler colonial fantasy. Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly have convened essays that are surpassingly lively, nimble, exacting, and generous in their engagement with the amplest possibilities of critique. Situation Critical is a greatly welcome intervention.” - Peter Coviello, author of (Is There God after Prince? Dispatches from an Age of Last Things)