The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
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"This volume provides students of American literature with models and methods for approaching the question of embodiment. It underscores the body as at once dynamic, shaping our experience of the world through complex interplay between social and biological influences, and intersectional, resisting attempts for discrete analysis at every turn. By highlighting these two qualities, The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body foregrounds the body's enmeshed interspersal throughout core concerns of American literary studies, including those focused on race, gender, sexuality,…mehr

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"This volume provides students of American literature with models and methods for approaching the question of embodiment. It underscores the body as at once dynamic, shaping our experience of the world through complex interplay between social and biological influences, and intersectional, resisting attempts for discrete analysis at every turn. By highlighting these two qualities, The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body foregrounds the body's enmeshed interspersal throughout core concerns of American literary studies, including those focused on race, gender, sexuality, history, and ecology. Despite this range of fields, the insights from one particular field--disability studies--comprise the volume's most prominent conceptual resource, providing a thread linking essays on topics as seemingly varied as sentimental fiction, slave narratives, the history of reading, and ecocriticism. The significance of disability studies to discussions of embodiment in American literature shouldn't be surprising. Disability, illness, and chronic pain were among the first topics within Americanist criticism to veer away from a Cartesian mind/body split that otherwise frequently manifested in starker and more binary terms than even Descartes envisioned. To take just one example, William Joseph Long's 1913 American Literature: A Study of the Men and the Books that in the Earlier and Later Times Reflect the American Spirit almost exclusively speaks of authors as disembodied creators. The notable exception occurs when Long turns to those writers experiencing sickness and chronic pain, such as Puritan Michael Wigglesworth, whose experience as a 'lifelong sufferer from disease' finds itself reflected in the 'powerful but morbid imagination' of his poetry. Despite the limitations of his ableist worldview, the disabled bodies of his subjects force Long into a nascent understanding of how bodies and creative imaginations collaborate to produce visions of the world that influence readers' perceptions and understandings"--