Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This book recovers an important set of American literary texts from the turn of the nineteenth century to the Civil War that focus on bodies that seem to have minds of their own. Artists such as Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, Edwin Forrest, Henry Box Brown, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Herman Melville represented the evocative expressiveness of these literary bodies. With twitches and roars, flushes and blushes, these lively literary bodies shaped the development of American Literature even as they challenged the structures of chattel slavery, market capitalism, and the patriarchy. Situated within its historical context, this new story of nineteenth-century American Literature thus reveals how American literary expression-from novels to melodramas, from panoramas to magic tricks-represented less repressive, more capacious possibilities of conscious existence, and new forms of the human for those dehumanized in the nineteenth century.

Introduction: minding the bodies of nineteenth-century American literature; 1. Drift: medical discourse, racial embodiment, and Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee; 2. Betweenness: medical discourse, racial performance, and the living labor of Edwin Forrest's body; 3. Doubleness: the four acts of Henry Box Brown's black embodiment; 4. Beyond: spiritual materialism, sentimentalism, and the afterlives of embodiment; Conclusion: reading for the lived experience of embodiment in nineteenth-century American literature; Bibliography.