This essay argues that Catharine Sedgwick's 1827 novel, Hope Leslie, posits an American identity forged in structurally incestuous families of siblings connected through a joint ethic of sacrifice. Sedgwick foregrounds chosen, affective relationships and relationally constituted subjects by theorizing miscegenation and incest–exogamy and endogamy–not as mutually exclusive but as identical with each other.

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© 2013 by The New England Quarterly
2013
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