Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

Few concepts are more widely discussed or more passionately invoked in American public culture than that of privacy. What these discussions have lacked, however, is a historically informed sense of privacy's genealogy in U.S. culture. Now, Milette Shamir traces this peculiarly American obsession back to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when our modern understanding of privacy took hold.

Shamir explores how various disco...