Peter Coviello's Tomorrow's Parties is an important contribution to queer studies of nineteenth-century American literature, which have, since the 2000s, entered into a heady, at times perplexing, new realm of novel engagements with questions of sexual history. Focussing on such topics as the aesthetic, sensuality, nonhuman/inhuman/animal relationships, and, especially, temporality, post-2000s queer scholarship has moved beyond what we can call “the thesis”: Michel Foucault's contention in The History of Sexuality, Volume I, that the “homosexual became a species” in the 1860s, with the term for heterosexual not emerging until the 1880s.Footnote ¹ Consequently, the late nineteenth century is the decisive period in which modern sexuality, through new terminologies in medical and criminal discourse, emerged along with the identities and subjectivities not only tethered to them, but created as a result of them. Coviello's book problematizes and thoroughly rethinks nineteenth-century American literature's relation to the thesis, yet, like many works in the field, never relinquishes his fidelity to it. A 1914 letter from Henry James to Annie Fields (the longtime companion of the great realist author Sarah Orne Jewett) provides a foundation for the readings to follow in that, for Coviello, James alludes to a sense of loss that both he and Fields (and the now-dead Jewett) share. This loss is the period of more free-floating, less categorized and categorizable affectional and sexual feeling before the Oscar Wilde trials and the burst of new sexual taxonomies produced the more recognizable present dominated by the hetero/homo divide and its strictures.

Coviello's thesis is that works from the earlier decades in the century foreground what he calls “earliness” – a “sexuality not yet bound into the coordinated linkages it would come to be under the sign of modern sexuality, and not yet wholly captivated by the languages in which it more and more found itself spoken” (185). His goal is to assemble “an archive of lost possibilities” (204), and in this regard the work of Henry David Thoreau, as a “figure who neither exemplifies his present nor anticipates the future but who, in his idiosyncratic conjugations of sexual being, suggests instead the outlines of a future that would not come to be” (32), is metonymic. By exploring the work of forward-thinking authors whose visions of the future were unrealizable on whatever levels, Coviello strategically preserves the thesis of sexual history that Foucault innovated while also transcending the strictures of this thesis as it was applied in earlier queer-theory phases, namely the contention that nothing like a homosexual identity existed before the late nineteenth century and what came before it could only be viewed as practices, behaviors, and, especially, acts – sexual and otherwise. Coviello explores the depths of queer feeling in authors such as Thoreau, Whitman, Jewett, Hawthorne, Henry James, and, in one especially ambitious chapter, Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Herman Melville.

Coviello exhaustively considers the resonances of the works he studies at the level of the sentence, in addition to their larger significance. He applies the same finesse and refinement to analyses of critical thought. In his eloquent, probing manner, he yields considerable insights into both literature and theory. Analyzing a letter that Walt Whitman, in his capacity as a Civil War nurse, wrote to the parents of a young man whom the poet nursed during his dying days, Coviello sheds remarkable light on the interpersonal dynamics of Whitman's relationship not only with the young men he tended but with the extended world of their legacies as they intersected with his own. In his chapter on The Blithedale Romance, Coviello analyzes the novel as Hawthorne's critique, rather than enactment, of homophobia, a reading with which I wholly concur. Indeed, in the Coda to the book as a whole, Coviello offers one of the best accounts of the logic of homophobia that I have come across:

The problems of this often brilliant book are endemic to the field. Like other recent works, Coviello's book, while it does not ignore it completely, pays very little attention to the crucial issue of gender, its conformist norms and their relation to all forms of sexuality, perhaps especially the nonnormative. The book is, finally, much more in the grips of Americanist critical discourse than it is free to grapple with the full range of meanings in the primary texts under consideration. Reflective of the growing concentration on issues of temporality in the field, Coviello offers some highly debatable contentions such as the figures of earliness and the lost archives. In my view, the nineteenth-century authors of the antebellum period were engaging in the early phases of a modern discourse of sexual identity that developed, at times wrenchingly, into psychoanalytic, among other medical discourse; Coviello labors to preserve the earlier writers' thought from contamination by the discursive explosion at the end of the century. As I read Coviello's admirable work, I kept wondering what Americanist criticism of nineteenth-century sexual history in literary works might look like if the field were to loosen its obsessive fealty to Foucauldian paradigms even as it strives so visibly to demonstrate that it has moved past them. In any event, though an uneven and at times frustrating book, Coviello's Tomorrow's Parties is bold, striking, stimulating, and valuable reading for anyone interested in the difficult questions it raises.