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

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 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 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) 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) 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. - Samuel Otter,University of California, Berkeley [Salazar] ably integrates an impressive array of materials into his readings. (New England Quarterly)