| Portion of title |
Queer masculinities in the early United States |
| Abstract |
"Feeling Singular presents the early United States as a queer and messy world of social outcasts and eccentric personalities all vying - and in spectacular ways failing - for public attention. What image of the early United States emerges through the perspective of a cantankerous and workaday mechanic who botched his attempts to get people interested in his steamboat contraption? Through closely reading a range of texts-from manuscripts to hastily printed books, and from phonetically spelled pamphlets to sexually explicit broadsides-this book uses the language of queer studies to understand what makes someone singular in the early U.S. and how that singularity points at the ruptures in social codes that often get normalized through historical analysis. These figures include a struggling working-class mechanic named John Fitch; a formerly enslaved Black Revolutionary War veteran and Vermont farmer named Jeffrey Brace; a self-declared "Lord" named Timothy Dexter; Dexter's strange "poet laureate" Jonathan Plummer; and lastly a hermit named William "Amos" Wilson. These singular life narratives provide noncanonical counters to what tends to be the staid studies of early U.S. literary cultures. By telling the stories of a motley set of characters, this book emphasizes the singular elements that constitute the lives that live under the shadow of cultural canons and norms. Departing from the likes of Benjamin Franklin, whom tradition positions as a paragon of self-production, this book offers the everyday queer failures that permeate the past"-- Provided by publisher. |
| General note | Originally presented as author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Access restriction | Available only to authorized users. |
| Technical details | Mode of access: World Wide Web |
| Genre/form | Electronic books. |
| LCCN | 2023048033 |
| ISBN | 9780197687505 (hardback) |
| ISBN | (epub) |
