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America and the Long 19th Century Series
Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America
Honorable Mention for the 2014 MLA Alan Bray Memorial Award
Finalist for the 2013 LAMBDA LGBT Studies Book Award
In nineteenth-century America—before the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde, before the public emergence of categories like homo- and heterosexuality—what were the parameters of sex? Did people characterize their sexuality as a set of bodily practices, a form of identification, or a mode of relation? Was it even something an individual could be said to possess? What could be counted as sexuality?
Tomorrow’s Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America provides a rich new conceptual language to describe the movements of sex in the period before it solidified into the sexuality we know, or think we know. Taking up authors whose places in the American history of sexuality range from the canonical to the improbable—from Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and James to Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Mormon founder Joseph Smith—Peter Coviello delineates the varied forms sex could take in the lead-up to its captivation by the codings of “modern” sexuality. While telling the story of nineteenth-century American sexuality, he considers what might have been lostin the ascension of these new taxonomies of all the extravagant, untimely ways of imagining the domain of sex that, under the modern regime of sexuality, have sunken into muteness or illegibility. Taking queer theorizations of temporality in challenging new directions, Tomorrow’s Parties assembles an archive of broken-off, uncreated futures—futures that would not come to be. Through them, Coviello fundamentally reorients our readings of erotic being and erotic possibility in the literature of nineteenth-century America.
Finalist for the 2013 LAMBDA LGBT Studies Book Award
In nineteenth-century America—before the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde, before the public emergence of categories like homo- and heterosexuality—what were the parameters of sex? Did people characterize their sexuality as a set of bodily practices, a form of identification, or a mode of relation? Was it even something an individual could be said to possess? What could be counted as sexuality?
Tomorrow’s Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America provides a rich new conceptual language to describe the movements of sex in the period before it solidified into the sexuality we know, or think we know. Taking up authors whose places in the American history of sexuality range from the canonical to the improbable—from Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and James to Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Mormon founder Joseph Smith—Peter Coviello delineates the varied forms sex could take in the lead-up to its captivation by the codings of “modern” sexuality. While telling the story of nineteenth-century American sexuality, he considers what might have been lostin the ascension of these new taxonomies of all the extravagant, untimely ways of imagining the domain of sex that, under the modern regime of sexuality, have sunken into muteness or illegibility. Taking queer theorizations of temporality in challenging new directions, Tomorrow’s Parties assembles an archive of broken-off, uncreated futures—futures that would not come to be. Through them, Coviello fundamentally reorients our readings of erotic being and erotic possibility in the literature of nineteenth-century America.
265 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 4, 2025
Was Walt Whitman gay? i mean yeah he slept with men? but was he gayyyyyyy? no not really, that word didn't exist yet. Coviello tells us to quit reading 19th century figures through modern sexuality and instead to read sexuality as they did: bodily sensation, big giant unnamable feelings, and (importantly) separate from the institution of marriage. Also, gives great content of how marriage, sexuality, and gender were shifting around the time of the Oscar Wilde trials, and how the Wilde trials put these changes on the fast track to labels, hard defining lines, and the end of marriage purely as a financial institution. Instead, marriage becomes a qualifier of citizenship.
As always, I wish the connections to the Civil War were more explicitly written, as bodies are mainly defined in the 19c THROUGH the Civil War and the 13th amendment.
(QE)
As always, I wish the connections to the Civil War were more explicitly written, as bodies are mainly defined in the 19c THROUGH the Civil War and the 13th amendment.
(QE)
July 12, 2015
I really enjoyed this book, especially the ways in engaged with the notion that sexual identity was diffuse and inchoate until the Wilde trials although at times I wished for a list of nineteenth century authors that wasn't so rigidly constructed. However queer Whitman is (a lot if you ask Coviello or me), I was interested in thinking more about how to talk about sex/sexual expression/identity in works that aren't so explicitly sexual. Also, I guess I wanted to know more about how the state has contributed to making sexual identity legible or illegible. The state seems so essential to our understanding of modern sexuality, but is nearly absent in the book. Those reservations and lingering questions aside, I highly recommend (but please don't recall it from me until I get paid and can buy my own copy!).
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews