| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 207 words from this article are provided below; about 422 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850–1930. By Betsy Klimasmith. (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005. xiv, 293 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 1-58465-496-1. Paper, $26.00, ISBN 1-58465-497-X.)

Betsy Klimasmith's At Home in the City is a genuine pleasure to read. The narrative seamlessly moves from close readings of urban novels to discussions about architectural designs of tenements and boarding houses as well as of New York's Central Park. It analyzes the interiority of urban domestic fiction then literally and figuratively goes outside, to extra- literary sources. It is as if the very structure of the book confirms its central observation: the boundedness of the rural home gave way to an urban domesticity, where home is understood in terms of permeability, interconnectedness, and the fluidity of private and public spaces. Klimasmith links Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852), and particularly Zenobia's high-class lodgings, for instance, to Boston's Tremont House, which was designed to balance autonomy with connections, privacy with sociality. The next chapter pairs Henry James's The Bostonians (1886) with Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted's Central Park in order to demonstrate how urban networks destabilized notions of privacy and publicity, where personal interactions became public performances.

. . .

There are about 422 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.