The project of writing, thinking, and talking about nineteenth-century bodies and sexualities may seem like a relatively recent innovation within the fields of literary and social history. But it is important to begin by recognizing that this type of inquiry is not in fact altogether new. In 1923 the British modernist author and critic D. H. Lawrence surveyed the field of what he referred to as "classic American literature" with similar themes in mind. Authors such as Benjamin Franklin, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Henry Dana, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman could be characterized according to Lawrence in his Studies in Classic American Literature by their collective attempt to give expression to what he referred to as "IT": "You have got to pull the democratic and idealistic clothes off American utterance, and see what you can of the dusky body of IT...