Beside You in Time

“Beside You in Time is a singularly powerful meditation on the biopoliticized timing of bodies but also upon the carnal body as an instrument of sociability, a tool for fugitive world-making. Elizabeth Freeman takes discourses and scenes we thought we knew and, by locating them in a context so fresh in conception, brings them to a new dynamic life. Americanists, queer theorists, anybody interested in the state of critical theory after New Historicism: all will be eager to get hold of this field-shifting and necessary book.” - Peter Coviello, author of Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism

“Elizabeth Freeman's fierce femme provocation expands contemporary critical thinking about biopower, leading queer Americanist scholarship toward an exploration of the rich potentialities buried within the history of sexuality.” - Dana Luciano, author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

"This book makes an important contribution to queer theory as well as to American literary and cultural studies in the long nineteenth century, as Elizabeth Freeman frames the field." - Daniel T. O'Hara, Review 19

"What I like most about Freeman’s Beside You in Time is its capacious sense of reading, along with the queer possibilities that inhere, for her, in all social encounters and interactions. The book is filled with insights on Freeman’s practice as a teacher and scholar. . . . Her close readings invite an intimate, associative interpretation that refreshes and surprises with its insights." - Ben Bascom, American Literary History

“For all the book’s theoretical heft, Freeman’s prose is light on its feet, sashaying with verve between high-theory argot and earnest straight-talk about people and characters who try to find the beat or set a new one: who ‘struggle both to inhabit the dominant temporalities that organize them, and to tap into…other modes of arranging past, present, and future.’ Chapters move with grace and conceptual exactness across a wide range of texts, allowing for many points of access….” - Dawn Coleman, Leviathan

“Freeman’s analytical imagination is on full display…. Beside You in Time helps us think differently about how bodies connect through time, through desire, through narrative (itself a chronological technology), and, most importantly, through contact with each other. She helps us reconsider our present moment as we are physically distanced but temporally together: on our computer screens and on the streets.” - Sarah E. Chinn, Studies in the Novel

“Freeman is productively in conversation with cultural theorists of the last forty years, and she argues generously and generatively, adding nuance and worthy provocations.” - Stephanie P. Browner, Modern Philology

“Beside You in Time . . . remind[s] us of the robust synergies between religious and queer studies, while suggesting how we might better understand the field’s long-standing emphasis on nonnormativity within rather than against histories of racist and colonial exclusions.” - Travis M. Foster, GLQ

“[Freeman’s] chapters elegantly build on each other, creating momentum and an increasingly complex net of interconnections between ideas and texts. . . . A theorization of time—its expansion and retraction, and the socialities and subjectivities it constitutes—seems an appropriate topic for our current moment."

“When readers get into the close readings that make up the bulk of Freeman’s discussion, they will find that she is a lucid and illuminating literary interpreter.”