Tomorrow's Parties

Peter Coviello is Department Head and Professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is the author of five books, including Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (UChicago Press, 2019) and Tomorrow's Parties (NYU, 2013). His work Is There God After Prince? is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2023.

• Acknowledgments Introduction: The Unspeakable Past Part One Lost Futures1 Disappointment, or, Thoreau in Love 2 Whitman at War Coda: A Little Destiny Part Two To Speak of the Woe That Is in Marriage3 Islanded: Jewett and the Uncompanioned Life 4 What Does the Polygamist Want? Frederick Douglass, Joseph Smith, and Marriage at the Edges of the Human Coda: Unceremoniousness Part Three Speech and Silence: Reckonings of the Queer FutureThe Tenderness of Beasts: Hawthorne at Blithedale 6 Made for Love: Olive Chancellor, Henry James, and The Bostonians Coda: The Turn Notes Index About the Author

"Succeeds at expanding the analytic vocabulary for describing intimate experience in the nineteenth century. Coviellos efforts to track the shifting meanings of time and sex will undoubtedly appeal to those with an interest in temporality, and anyone with an interest in Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson and the other subjects will appreciate Coviellos careful yet imaginative readings." (Lambda Literary) "Coviello models a profoundly sensitive approach to nineteenth-century American literatures & & broken-off futuresone that is willing and ableto get caught up in these authors ardent optimism and depressive realism and to ask, along with Thoreau, & & What is that other kind of lifeto which I am thus continually allured?" (Nineteenth-Century Literature) "In Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature, Coviello (Bowdoin College) offered a rereading of canonical 19th-century authors, focused on the problematic role that race played in constructing a sense of Americanness. Coviello returns with an even more ambitious reexamination of 19th century literature, focused on exploring what counted as sexuality during this period. Considering works by Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass, and writing by Mormon founder Joseph Smith, Coviello aims to disrupt views of the 19th century as primarily anticipating the development of modern taxonomies of sexuality. Instead, he examines 'errant possibilities for imagining sex that have sunk into kind of muteness with the advent of modern sexuality.' Coviello explicates texts and passages in which sexuality is represented as distinctly different from the modern regime of sexual specification, whether it is Thoreau's descriptions of 'exquisite carnal ravishment by sound' or Smith's attempt to pursue 'enlargement' via plural marriage. This book breaks new ground in theorizations of temporality for those working in queer theory, gender studies, and 19th century literature" (Choice) "Integral to the books success is Coviellos masterful style; he does not overwhelm the text in question but suggests new historical frameworks for & reading sexuality so his subjects can more easily speak for themselves." (American Nineteenth Century History) "In luminous readings of Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Joseph Smith, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James, among others, Tomorrows Parties provides a glimpse of some of the unrealized possibilities of sex in the long, last moments before it might have known itself as & sexuality in its modern senses" (American Literary History) "Coviello combines historical analysis and contemporary interpretation of former famous worksqueer reading as we call it today. Coviello always mentions his main problem: it would be impolite and incorrect to apply modern sexualities to the Victorian era. In the gay movement, Walt Whitman had been renamed as a gay writerCoviello emphasizes, & gay hadnt existed in Whitmans days. So Coviello is far from easy deconstructivism. He takes readers on a 200-page journey into nineteenth-century livelihood. Modern theorists may assist in social analysis, but Coviello never misuses them for explanations of the past. [] Coviellos book is worth reading. He offers great description and interpretation of literary sexual discourse in 19th century America." (Sexuality and Culture)