The Art of Retreat: Domestic Romanticisms in the Early United States

by Laurel V. Hankins

Overview

The political and cultural fantasy of home as a retreat from the pressures of the world first emerged in the U.S. alongside two major nineteenth-century literary movements: Romanticism and domestic fiction. Upending accepted gendered narratives from this period, The Art of Retreat posits that these movements originated from a domestic culture already in transition, in which home was frequently a more complicated site of self-interested pleasure, coerced labor, creole social reproduction, homosocial intimacy, bachelor whimsy, petty tyranny, racial abuse, and transgender capacity. The early national periodicals, sketches, and novels examined here lend themselves to this interpretation. Hankins argues that the literary tradition emerging from these decades—one that aligned creative genius with domestic retreat—reminds us that a politics that appeals to private feeling must reckon with new interpretations of labor, kinship, and reform in exchange for the promise of consensual citizenship.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684485642
Publisher:	Bucknell University Press
Publication date:	05/13/2025
Series:	Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	188
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

LAUREL V. HANKINS is an associate professor in the Department of English and Communication at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where she teaches courses on literary theory and early and nineteenth-century American literature. Her recent work can be found in journals such as Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life and Nineteenth-Century Literature and in the edited collection The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art (Bucknell University Press).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Inventing Domestic Retreat                                                                            
1. Charles Brockden Brown’s Domestic Scenes                                                 
2. Salmagundi’s Elbow-Chair Domesticity                                                                     
3. The Voice of Nature: Hope Leslie and Early American Romanticism           
4. Epicene Genius in Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme                                            
5. Tracking Harriet E. Wilson’s Spiritualist Visions                                                        
Coda: #WFH                                                                                                                           
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography   
Index

Editorial Reviews

In this compelling study, Hankins reconceptualizes domestic retreat as a speculative fiction produced by a host of figures not commonly associated with the domestic, including cosmopolitans, whimsical bachelors, gender non-conformists, and spiritualists. A surprising and beautifully written argument about the fantasies of the public-private divide that still structure our ideas of work and home today.

author of The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States - Sarah Blackwood

"The Art of Retreat disentangles the romance and romanticism from nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Cogently situating her argument in a rich theoretical and historical landscape, Hankins's capacious understanding of domestic retreat challenges the primacy of the marriage plot and its production of disciplined subjects, instead revealing the domestic as a site for speculation and experimentation."

author of Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America - Karen A. Weyler

"The Art of Retreat offers an important and thoroughgoing re-account of the relationship between domestic retreat and the literary movements of romanticism and domestic fiction in the nineteenth-century United States. Tracing a cultural moment of transition for envisioning domestic retreat, Laurel Hankins challenges gendered critical narratives about the private sphere that have consolidated around both movements, and, in expanding the category of domestic fiction, demonstrates a wide range of alternatives for imagining retreat."

author of American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary World - Michelle Sizemore

"The Art of Retreat is an exciting reconsideration of the development of domestic fiction in the United States. By shifting attention to an early nineteenth-century moment when ideas of private retreat were unsettled and varied, Hankins uncovers the myriad aesthetic possibilities of domestic retreat that have been overlooked due to a tacit reliance on the more narrow, gendered conception of domesticity that became dominant later in the century. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the early history of American fiction."

author of Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States - Thomas Koenigs