Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833–1879

Title

Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833–1879

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Description

Fleshing Out America explores the representation of the body in the work of seven authors, all of whom were involved with their era's reform movements: Lydia Maria Child, Frances E. W. Harper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin R. Delany. For such American writers, who connected the individual body symbolically with the body politic, the new science was fraught with possibility and peril. Covering topics from representation, spectatorship, and essentialism to difference, power, and authority, Carolyn Sorisio places these writers' works in historical context and in relation to contemporary theories of corporeality. She shows how these authors struggled, in diverse and divergent ways, to flesh out America—to define, even defend, the nation's body in a tumultuous period.

ISBN

978-0-8203-2357-2

Publication Date

7-1-2002

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

City

Athens, GA

Disciplines

American Literature

Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833–1879

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