The Good Body: Normalizing Visions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 1836–1867 examines literary and cultural representations of so-called “normal” and “abnormal” bodies in the antebellum and Civil War-era United States and the ways in which these representations operated as a means of justifying, critiquing, and problematizing prominent concerns of the period: the relationship between the health of American citizens and national progress, Western expansion, debates over slavery, the threatened dissolution of the Union in the Civil War, and the legitimation of the post-war reunified nation. Considering a wide range of sources—classic works of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry; health reform textbooks; proslavery documents; photographs of Civil War veterans; and Civil War medical records of the federal government—this study demonstrates that American literature of this period typically imagined real and fictional bodies as healthy, aesthetically pleasing, and symbolically coherent in relation to other bodies imagined as deviating from these “norms” to preserve existing political and social orders but also, at times, to challenge the hegemonic power of US institutions. In addition to the literary material considered, central in this book are critical approaches to history and disability studies which illuminate the construction of physical “normality” and contribute to recent scholarly attempts to assess the significance of physical differences in the literature and culture of the United States.
