Introduction: The Death of Privacy; Acknowledgments; 1. Reinventing Privacy; 2. "Thirsting for the Hierarchic Privacy of Queen Victoria's Century": Robert Lowell and the Transformation of Privacy; 3. Penetrating Privacy: Confessional Poetry, Griswold v. Connecticut, and Containment Ideology; 4. Confessions Between a Woman and Her Doctor: Roe v. Wade and the Gender of Privacy; 5. Confessing the Ordinary: Paul Monette's Love Alone and Bowers v. Hardwick, An Epilogue; Notes; Works Cited; Index
Summary
Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America explores the relationship between confessional poetry and constitutional privacy doctrine, both of which emerged at the end of the 1950s. While the public declarations of the Supreme Court and the private declamations of the lyric poet may seem unrelated, both express the upheavals in American notions of privacy that marked the Cold War era. Nelson situates the poetry and legal decisions as part of a far wider anxiety about privacy that erupted across the social, cultural, and political spectrum during this period. She explores the panic over the "death of