New Books In Literary Studies

J. Samaine Lockwood, Associate Professor in the English Department at George Mason University, specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and gender and sexuality studies. In an hour-long conversation, we discuss her new book Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). New England has long presented an idealized sense of its past. Restored colonial homes, antique shops, white picket fences around town greens—these are some features you may associate with a conservative, even blinkered view of the past. But the reality is otherwise. Lockwood shows how the story behind this burst of regionalist pride, much the product of the late nineteenth century, is queerer and more women-centered than you could possibly have imagined. In her book, Lockwood argues that nineteenth-century women writers, photographers, and colonial revivalists presented the queer, unmarried daughter of New England as a figure crucial to remembering and pr