Customer Reviews

Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Americanists)

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Readers will have to contend with this book and its forceful--and potentially disturbing--points about the liability incurred by citizenship. What giveth political life bringeth political and social death. That's Castronovo in this riveting and demanding book. But even if you don't agree with his diagnosis of American culture, there's still a lot here including a groundbreaking reading of _INcidents_, fascinating stuff about mediums, a richly contextualized interpretation of _Blithedale_, analyses of medical discourse and Supreme Court decisions and constitutional amendments. This book is packed and all sorts of texts are brought together. It's really made me think, not just in the scatching one's head sort of way, but in terms of considering the price that must be paid to enter the domain of what counts as politics.