Beside You in Time

Elizabeth Freeman is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories and The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture, both also published by Duke University Press.

“Beside You in Time is a singularly powerful meditation on the biopoliticized timing of bodies but also upon the carnal body as an instrument of sociability, a tool for fugitive world-making. Elizabeth Freeman takes discourses and scenes we thought we knew and, by locating them in a context so fresh in conception, brings them to a new dynamic life. Americanists, queer theorists, anybody interested in the state of critical theory after New Historicism: all will be eager to get hold of this field-shifting and necessary book.” - Peter Coviello, author of (Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism) “Elizabeth Freeman's fierce femme provocation expands contemporary critical thinking about biopower, leading queer Americanist scholarship toward an exploration of the rich potentialities buried within the history of sexuality.” - Dana Luciano, author of (Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America) "This book makes an important contribution to queer theory as well as to American literary and cultural studies in the long nineteenth century, as Elizabeth Freeman frames the field." - Daniel T. O'Hara (Review 19) "What I like most about Freeman’s Beside You in Time is its capacious sense of reading, along with the queer possibilities that inhere, for her, in all social encounters and interactions. The book is filled with insights on Freeman’s practice as a teacher and scholar. . . . Her close readings invite an intimate, associative interpretation that refreshes and surprises with its insights." - Ben Bascom (American Literary History) “Freeman’s analytical imagination is on full display…. Beside You in Time helps us think differently about how bodies connect through time, through desire, through narrative (itself a chronological technology), and, most importantly, through contact with each other. She helps us reconsider our present moment as we are physically distanced but temporally together: on our computer screens and on the streets.” - Sarah E. Chinn (Studies in the Novel) “Freeman is productively in conversation with cultural theorists of the last forty years, and she argues generously and generatively, adding nuance and worthy provocations.” - Stephanie P. Browner (Modern Philology) “Beside You in Time . . . remind[s] us of the robust synergies between religious and queer studies, while suggesting how we might better understand the field’s long-standing emphasis on nonnormativity within rather than against histories of racist and colonial exclusions.” - Travis M. Foster (GLQ) “When readers get into the close readings that make up the bulk of Freeman’s discussion, they will find that she is a lucid and illuminating literary interpreter.”- Thomas Allen (Journal of American Studies)

• Acknowledgments  viiIntroduction  11. Shake it Off: The Physiopolitics of Shaker Dance, 1774–1856  272. The Gift of Constant Escape: Playing Dead in African American Literature, 1849–1900  523. Feeling Historicisms: Libidinal History in Twain and Hopkins  874. The Sense of Unending: Defective Chronicity in "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Melanctha"  1245. Sacra/Mentality in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood  158Coda. Rhythm Travel  187Notes  191References  199Index  219