The Perfecting of Nature: Reforming Bodies in Antebellum Literature Doty Josh
The Perfecting of Nature: Reforming Bodies in Antebellum Literature Doty Josh The nineteenth century saw a marked change in how Americans viewed and understood the human form. From the…
Specifikacia The Perfecting of Nature: Reforming Bodies in Antebellum Literature Doty Josh
The Perfecting of Nature: Reforming Bodies in Antebellum Literature Doty Josh
The nineteenth century saw a marked change in how Americans viewed and understood the human form. 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. These new ways of understanding the body reflect how Americans were beginning to see the body's constituent parts as interconnected.
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 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.