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Review: Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America

Review: Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America P e t e r Co v i e l l o, Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Pp. xvi þ 252. $75 cloth; $24 paper. Peter Coviello's Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America opens with a seventy-one-yearold Henry James musing wistfully and cryptically in his correspondence to Annie Adams Fields--editor, author, and close companion to Sarah Orne Jewett--about ``the unspeakable past,'' a ``far back'' time spent among ``those who know what I am talking about'' (quoted on p. 1). Cautioning himself that he ``musn't speak as if we were too bleakly stranded today,'' James nonetheless concludes that, now, ``almost nobody understands what we mean, do they?'' (p. 1). For Coviello, James's pining for a lost world of barely speakable intimacy strikes a resounding sour note in a story that, for many recent historians, is best sung as a song of progress: the emergence of modern sexuality. Nearly two decades after the trial of Oscar Wilde, we do not find James embracing a newly available vocabulary for same-sex desire. Rather, in Coviello's telling, the letter's nostalgic tone retrospectively reveals the possibilities for pleasure and politics http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Nineteenth-Century Literature University of California Press

Review: Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America

Wolff, Nathan
Nineteenth-Century Literature , Volume 69 (4) – Mar 1, 2015
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Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
© 2015 by The Regents of the University of California
Subject
Reviews
ISSN
0891-9356
eISSN
1067-8352
DOI
10.1525/ncl.2015.69.4.547
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

P e t e r Co v i e l l o, Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Pp. xvi þ 252. $75 cloth; $24 paper. Peter Coviello's Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America opens with a seventy-one-yearold Henry James musing wistfully and cryptically in his correspondence to Annie Adams Fields--editor, author, and close companion to Sarah Orne Jewett--about ``the unspeakable past,'' a ``far back'' time spent among ``those who know what I am talking about'' (quoted on p. 1). Cautioning himself that he ``musn't speak as if we were too bleakly stranded today,'' James nonetheless concludes that, now, ``almost nobody understands what we mean, do they?'' (p. 1). For Coviello, James's pining for a lost world of barely speakable intimacy strikes a resounding sour note in a story that, for many recent historians, is best sung as a song of progress: the emergence of modern sexuality. Nearly two decades after the trial of Oscar Wilde, we do not find James embracing a newly available vocabulary for same-sex desire. Rather, in Coviello's telling, the letter's nostalgic tone retrospectively reveals the possibilities for pleasure and politics

Journal

Nineteenth-Century Literature – University of California Press

Published: Mar 1, 2015

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