The perfecting of nature : reforming bodies in antebellum literature / Josh Doty.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Doty, Josh, author.

Series:

North Carolina scholarship online.

North Carolina scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human body in literature.

American literature--1783-1850--History and criticism.

American literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (181 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Summary:

The 19th century saw a marked change in how Americans viewed & understood the human form. These new ways of understanding the body reflect how Americans were beginning to see the body's constituent parts as interconnected. From the transcendentalists' idealized concept of self to the rise of Darwinian theory after the Civil War, the era & its writers redefined the human body as both deeply reactive & malleable. Josh Doty explores antebellum American conceptions of bioplasticity - the body's ability to react & change from interior & exterior forces - & argues that literature helped to shape the cultural reception of these ideas. These new ways of thinking about the body's responsiveness to its surroundings enabled exercise fanatics, cold-water bathers, cookbook authors, & everyday readers to understand the tractable body as a way to reform the United States at the physiological level.

Contents:

Transcendental self-culture and the horizons of bioplasticity

Governance, race, and alimentary selfhood in Melville

Sculpting hte body electric: exercise and self-fashioning in Walt Whitman

Tricks of the blood: heredity and repair in Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Coda: literature and neurological selfhood.

Notes:

Also issued in print: 2020.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

979-88-908595-4-9

979-88-908595-5-6

1-4696-5962-X

1-4696-5960-3