Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States

This book examines how pain is represented in a range of literary texts and genres from the nineteenth-century United States. It considers the aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical implications of pain as the national culture of pain progressively transformed in the wake of the invention of anesthesia.

List of contents

• Introduction


• 1: Emerson's Economy of Pain


• 2: Willing Pain in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl


• 3: Emily Dickinson and the "High Perogative" of Pain


• 4: Henry James, Invisible Wounds, and the Civil War


• 5: The Pedagogy of Pain in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar


• 6: Pain, Will, and Writing in the Diary of Alice James

About the author

Thomas Constantinesco is Professor of American Literature at Sorbonne Université, France. He also taught at Yale, Oxford, and Université de Paris. Between 2014 and 2019, he was a Junior Fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France and, in 2019-2021, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at Oxford. He is the author of Ralph Waldo Emerson: L'Amérique à l'essai (Éditions Rue d'Ulm, 2012). He has published essays on nineteenth-century American literature in such venues as The New England Quarterly, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, American Periodicals, and Textual Practice. With Sophie Laniel-Musitelli, he co-edited Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature (Routledge, 2015).

Summary

This book examines how pain is represented in a range of literary texts and genres from the nineteenth-century United States. It considers the aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical implications of pain as the national culture of pain progressively transformed in the wake of the invention of anesthesia.

Additional text

Writing Pain invites us to celebrate pain's "messiness" rather than anesthetize it—a move that invites new thrilling examinations of identity and selfhood as well as the worlds and words born of pain.

Product details

• Authors: THOM CONSTANTINESCO, Thomas Constantinesco, Thomas (Professor of American Lite Constantinesco, Constantinesco Thomas
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.01.2022
• EAN: 9780192855596
• ISBN: 978-0-19-285559-6
• No. of pages: 278
• Series: Oxford Studies in American Literary History; Oxford Studies in American Lit
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; USA, Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / American / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, c 1500 onwards to present day, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, United States of America, USA, History of the Americas, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers