American author and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. draws on his medical background to lend credence to the creepy central premise of his novel Elsie Venner. When a woman suffers a snakebite during pregnancy, the trauma leads to unforeseen -- and horrific -- consequences.

In this major reconsideration of Herman Melville’s life and work, Michael Paul Rogin shows that Melville’s novels are connected both to the important issues of his time and to the exploits of his patrician and politically prominent family—which, three generations after its Revolutionary War heroes, produced an alcoholic, a bankrupt, and a suicide. Rogin argues that a history of Melville’s fiction, and of the society represented in it, is also a history of the writer’s family. He describes how that family first engaged Melville in and then isolated him from American political and social life. Melville’s brother and father-in-law are shown to link Moby-Dick to the crisis over expansion and slavery. White-Jacket and Billy Budd, which concern shipboard conflicts between masters and seamen, are related to an execution at sea in which Melville’s cousin played a decisive part. The figure of Melville’s father haunts The Confidence Man, whose subject is the triumph of the marketplace and the absence of authority. A provocative study of one of our supreme literary artists.

A broad treatment of the cultural, social, political, and literary under-pinnings of an entire period and movement in American letters The Vast and Terrible Drama is a critical study of the context in which authors such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London created their most significant work. In 1896 Frank Norris wrote: "Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary . . . and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama." There could be "no teacup tragedies here." This volume broadens our understanding of literary naturalism as a response to these and other aesthetic concerns of the 19th century. Themes addressed include the traditionally close connection between French naturalism and American literary naturalism; relationships between the movement and the romance tradition in American literature, as well as with utopian fictions of the 19th century; narrative strategies employed by the key writers; the dominant naturalist theme of determinism; and textual readings that provide broad examples of the role of the reader. By examining these and other aspects of American literary naturalism, Link counters a century of criticism that has perhaps viewed literary naturalism too narrowly, as a subset of realism, bound by the conventions of realistic narration.

Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States is a collection of twelve essays by cultural critics that exposes how fraught relations of identity and race appear through imaging technologies in architecture, scientific discourse, sculpture, photography, painting, music, theater, and, finally, the twenty-first century visual commentary of Kara Walker. Throughout these essays, the racial practices of the nineteenth century are juxtaposed with literary practices involving some of the most prominent writers about race and identity, such as Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the technologies of performance including theater and music. Recent work in critical theories of vision, technology, and the production of ideas about racial discourse has emphasized the inextricability of photography with notions of race and American identity. The collected essays provide a vivid sense of how imagery about race appears in the formative period of the nineteenth-century United States.

This book investigates how popular American literature and film transformed the poisonous woman from a misogynist figure used to exclude women and minorities from political power into a feminist hero used to justify the expansion of their public roles. Sara Crosby locates the origins of this metamorphosis in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Harriet Beecher Stowe applied an alternative medical discourse to revise the poisonous Cassy into a doctor. The newly “medicalized” poisoner then served as a focal point for two competing narratives that envisioned the American nation as a multi-racial, egalitarian democracy or as a white and male supremacist ethno-state. Crosby tracks this battle from the heroic healers created by Stowe, Mary Webb, Oscar Micheaux, and Louisia May Alcott to the even more monstrous poisoners or “vampires” imagined by E. D. E. N. Southworth, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theda Bara, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and D. W. Griffith.

During the period of the professionalization of American medicine, many authors were concerned with a concurrent urge to use their work as a means to convey their views about the meaning of the body and the origin and cure of disease. This book studies a range of these authors, including Louisa May Alcott, Charles W. Chesnutt, Margaret Fuller, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and William Dean Howells, among others.

Includes plot summaries and detailed descriptions of 194 works of science fiction from the 19th and 20th centuries.

In this study Joan Burbick interprets nineteenth-century narratives of health written by physicians, social reformers, lay healers, and literary artists in order to expose the conflicts underlying the creation of a national culture in America. These "fictions" of health include annual reports of mental asylums, home physician manuals, social reform books, and novels consumed by the middle class that functioned as cautionary tales of well-being. Read together these writings engage in a counterpoint of voices at once constructing and debating the hegemonic values of the emerging American nation. That political values flow from the daily exigencies of survival and enjoyment is one of the claims advanced by theorists of cultural hegemony. Broadening this assumption, the narratives of health presented here address the demands and desires of everyday life and construct a national discourse with directives on control, authority, and subordination. They articulate the wish for a healthy citizenry, freed of pain and saturated with well-being, and they insist upon specific ideologies and knowledges of the body in order to achieve this radiance of health. Divided into two parts, the work first examines the structures of authority found in health narratives and then studies the topology of the body found in a cross section of writings. The first part examines how the authority of "common sense" is pitted against that of physiological law and its transcendent "constitution" for the body. The second analyzes how specific knowledges about the brain, heart, nerves, and eye provide individual "keys" to health, indices that reveal the conflicts inherent in American nationalism. In studying thesenarratives of health, Healing the Republic confronts what Burbick sees as a certain fundamental uneasiness about democracy in America. Fearing the political freedom they hoped to embrace. Americans designed ways to control the body in the effort to create, impose, or encompass social order in a corporeal politics whose influences are felt to this day.

First Published in 2017. The first of its kind to address the ecogothic in American literature, this collection of fourteen articles illuminates a new and provocative literacy category, one that exists at the crossroads of the gothic and the environmental imagination, of fear and the ecosystems we inhabit.