Excerpt from Beyond Desire Neil bradley wrote letters to his friend Red Oliver. Neil said he was going to marry a woman in Kansas City. She was a revolutionist and Neil did not know when he first met her whether he was quite one or not. He said: It's like this, Red. You remember the empty feeling we had when we were in school together. I don't think you had it much when you were out here, but I did. I had it all the time I was in college and after I came home. I can't talk to Father and Mother about it much. They wouldn't under stand. It would hurt them. I guess, Neil said, that all of us younger men and women with any life in us have it now. Neil spoke in his letter of God. That was a bit strange, Red thought, coming from Neil. He must have got that from his woman. We can't hear His voice or feel Him in the land, he said. He thought perhaps the earlier men and women in America had something he and Red had missed. They had God, whatever that had meant to them. The early New Englanders, who had been so intellectually domi nant and who had influenced so much the thought of the whole country must have thought they had God really. If they had, what they had, it had come down to Neil and Red in some way pretty much weakened and washed out. Neil thought that. Religion, he said, was now an old gown, grown thin and with all the colors washed out of it. People still wore the old gown but it did not warm them any more. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This book explores the construction of male sexuality in nineteenth-century American literature and comes up with some startling findings. Far from desiring heterosexual sex and wishing to bond with other men through fraternity, the male protagonists of classic American literature mainly want to be left alone. Greven makes the claim that American men, eschewing both marriage and male friendship, strive to remain emotionally and sexually inviolate. Examining the work of traditional authors - Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Cooper, Irving, Stowe - Greven discovers highly untraditional and transgressive representations of desire and sexuality. Objects of desire from both women and other men, the inviolate males discussed in this study overturn established gendered and sexual categories, just as this study overturns archetypal assumptions about American manhood and American literature.