Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America

James B. Salazar

Published by New York University Press 2010

Bodies of Reform

The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America

James B. Salazar

Volume 14 in the series America and the Long 19th Century

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814741306.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Salazar James B. :

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

Reviews

[Salazar] ably integrates an impressive array of materials into his readings.

Samuel Otter,University of California, Berkeley:
James Salazar takes the term & characterpervasive and elusiveand 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.

William Gleason:
This detailed and carefully argued book charts the development of character...drawing on a rich archive of primary sources.

J.J. Benardete:
Dense and thought-provoking.

Debra Bernardi:
A comprehensive and original study of the various ways the rhetoric of character appeared in American culture.

Karen Sánchez-Eppler,Amherst College:
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.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction “The Grandest Thing in the World” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Philanthropic Taste Race and Character in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	36
2. Character Is Capital Manufacturing Habit in Mark Twain’s Character Factory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
3. Muscle Memory Building the Body Politic of Character in Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the National Police Gazette Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	112
4. “A Story Written on Her Face” Pauline Hopkins’s Unmaking of the Inherited Character of Race Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
5. Character’s Conduct Spaces of Interethnic Emulation in Jane Addams’s “Charitable Effort” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	204
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	301

Language: English
Publisher: New York University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Keywords: Bodies; category; century; character; charting; concept; culture; cultures; development; early-twentieth; fictional; from; genres; literature; mid-nineteenth; movements; nineteenth-century; pivotal; political; reconceives; reform; social; States; this; United

eBook

Published: September 13, 2010
ISBN: 9780814786536