Bodies of Reform

The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America

• Author(s): James B. Salazar,
• Publisher: NYU Press
• Pages: 300
• ISBN_10: 0814741312
  ISBN_13: 9780814741313
  
• Language: en
• Categories: History / United States / 19th Century , History / United States / 20th Century , History / Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies) , Language Arts & Disciplines / Rhetoric , Literary Criticism / General , Literary Criticism / American / General , Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / Politics , Political Science / General ,

Description:...

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series



From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet equally formidable “stuff,” has had a long and checkered history giving shape to the American national identity.

Bodies of Reform reconceives this pivotal category of nineteenth-century literature and culture by charting the development of the concept of “character” in the fictional genres, social reform movements, and political cultures of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. By reading novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside a diverse collection of texts concerned with the mission of building character, including child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines, libel and naturalization law, Scout handbooks, and success manuals, James B. Salazar uncovers how the cultural practices of representing character operated in tandem with the character-building strategies of social reformers. His innovative reading of this archive offers a radical revision of this defining category in U.S. literature and culture, arguing that character was the keystone of a cultural politics of embodiment, a politics that played a critical role in determining-and contesting-the social mobility, political authority, and cultural meaning of the raced and gendered body.