Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire
in Antebellum American Literature
by David Greven
Ashgate Publishing Limited. 250 pages, $109.95
AN ALARMING PASSAGE occurs on page 56 of David Greven’s Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature. After a lengthy introduction, in which author David Greven discusses subjects ranging from Freud to Lacan and a myriad of other sources in between, he proclaims that he’s more interested in comparing these psychoanalytic accounts to each other than he is in actually applying them to literature. Thus the title of his work might more accurately be “A Comparison of Various Psychoanalytic Theories about Antebellum Literature.”
Once the author finally gets down to exploring the literature itself, however, his book is actually rather interesting.
