| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic. By Bruce Burgett. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. viii, 213 pp. $39.50, ISBN 0-691-01559-7.)

Bruce Burgett's Sentimental Bodies applies the techniques of postmodern literary analysis to the question of citizenship in the decades following the American Revolution. Drawing on theoretical works by Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, Burgett analyzes the role of the body in constructing modern liberalism. "Tak[ing] seriously the corporeal metaphors" that permeate the debate between "a republican body politic and the politics of the democratic bodies that inhabit those structures," the book examines both political and literary evidence to explore the changing boundaries between the public and the private sphere, between sentiment and sexuality. The literal and figurative uses of George Washington's body, for example, reveal "the utopian lure" of the drive to create "a corporate nationalism." Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797) and Charles Brockden Brown's Clara Howard (1801) reveal the tensions created when women were assumed to be both the readers of fiction and the objects of discussion in the works they read. Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) explores the shifting understanding of privacy and obscenity and the creation of a liberal subject whose sexuality is defined as off limits to public debate. . . .

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