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Owning Up

By Katherine Adams

Owning Up

By Katherine Adams

0 - Default Title
Description
Owning Up argues that from its beginning the U.S. discourse on privacy has been couched in terms of violation and dispossession, so that even as nineteenth-century Americans came to regard privacy as a natural right, and to identify it with sacred ideals of democratic freedom and individuality, they also understood it as under threat or erasure. Using biographical and autobiographical writing as her primary archive, Adams traces the public narrative of imperiled privacy across five decades. Her analyses begin with the premise that nineteenth-century conceptions of privacy became meaningful only in negative relation to the encroaching forces of market capitalism and commodification. Where previous studies treat privacy as a stable category whose defining features are middle-class domesticity and femininity, Owning Up contends that privacy is an empty category that lacks fixed content and requires constant re-articulation via panic narratives. Chapters look at how the discourse of threatened privacy develops in conjunction with Romantic idealism and antebellum reform, racial reconstruction and the ethic of self-rights, and laissez faire Social Darwinism, and culminates at the end of the century in calls for legislation to protect the American individual's 'right to be let alone.'
Product details
Edition:
illustrated
Number of Pages:
274
Release Date:
2009-07-29
Publication Date:
2009-07-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0195336801
ISBN13:
9780195336801
Weight:
600 g
Height:
157 cm
Width:
235 cm
Thickness:
21 cm
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