A01=Josh Doty
American literature
American Romanticism
antebellum literature
Author_Josh Doty
body
Category=DSBF
Category=JHMC
Category=NHTB
Elsie Venner
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
health reform
Henry David Thoreau
Herman Melville
Leaves of Grass
literature and medicine
literature and science
Margaret Fuller
Moby-Dick
Nathaniel Hawthorne
nineteenth-century American literature
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Orson Fowler
plasticity
Ralph Waldo Emerson
reform
Romanticism
Sylvester Graham
The Guardian Angel
The House of the Seven Gables
Transcendentalism
Walden
Walt Whitman
Product details
- ISBN 9781469659619
- Weight: 280g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 16 Nov 2020
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The nineteenth century saw a marked change in how Americans viewed and 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 and its writers redefined the human body as both deeply reactive and malleable. Josh Doty explores antebellum American conceptions of bioplasticity - the body's ability to react and change from interior and exterior forces - and 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, and everyday readers to understand the tractable body as a way to reform the United States at the physiological level.
Doty weaves together analysis of religious texts, nutritional guides, and canonical literature to show the fluid relationship among bodies, literature, and culture in nineteenth-century America.
Doty weaves together analysis of religious texts, nutritional guides, and canonical literature to show the fluid relationship among bodies, literature, and culture in nineteenth-century America.
Josh Doty is assistant professor of English at St. Mary's University.
