Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (America and the Long 19th Century, 14) - Hardcover

Salazar, James B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814741304 ISBN 13: 9780814741306

Publisher: NYU Press, 2010

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

James B. Salazar is Assistant Professor of English at Temple University.

Review:

“Salazar’s splendid study gives this term a cultural history, and in the process shows how the rhetoric of character has profound effects on what we do from child-rearing, to physical exercise, to racial exclusion, to immigrant inclusion, and the contours of democratic citizenship itself.”
-Karen Sánchez-Eppler,Amherst College

"This detailed and carefully argued book charts the development of character...drawing on a rich archive of primary sources."-William Gleason,The Journal of American History

"A comprehensive and original study of the various ways the rhetoric of character appeared in American culture."-Debra Bernardi,American Literary Realism

"Dense and thought-provoking."-J.J. Benardete,Choice

"[Salazar] ably integrates an impressive array of materials into his readings." -New England Quarterly

“James Salazar takes the term ‘character’—pervasive and elusive—and accounts for its centrality by showing how it embodies the contradictions of modern America. In a series of intricate literary readings, he analyzes the ways in which the late-nineteenth-century obsession with building ‘character’ vivified social distinctions but also, in its instabilities, became the pivot for critique.”
-Samuel Otter,University of California, Berkeley

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0814741304
• ISBN 13: 9780814741306
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304