Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Perfecting of Nature: Reforming Bodies in Antebellum Literature

The Perfecting of Nature: Reforming Bodies in Antebellum Literature

Doty, Josh

Hardcover

Literary CriticismAnthropologyGeneral World History

ISBN10: 1469659603
ISBN13: 9781469659602
Publisher: Univ Of North Carolina Pr
Published: Nov 16 2020
Pages: 180
Weight: 1.01
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
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.

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