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Rehabilitating Bodies
Health, History, and the American Civil War
Lisa A. Long
"This is a fascinating, wide-ranging, and original book, and the first to examine the mutual constitution of bodies and historical meaning in the Civil War era."--Thomas Lutz, University of Iowa
This cleverly-written volume offers a fresh and sophisticated analysis of Civil War writing and of American medical and historical discourse."--American Literary Realism
"Theoretically sophisticated and historically provocative, Rehabilitating Bodies successfully lays bare 'the theoretical connection between corporeality and history as a field of discourse.'"--Clio
The American Civil War is one of the most documented, romanticized, and perennially reenacted events in American history. In Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War, Lisa A. Long charts how its extreme carnage dictated the Civil War's development into a lasting trope that expresses not only altered social, economic, and national relationships but also an emergent self-consciousness. Looking to a wide range of literary, medical, and historical texts, she explores how they insist on the intimate relationship between the war and a variety of invisible wounds, illnesses, and infirmities that beset Americans throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and plague us still today.
Long shows how efforts to narrate credibly the many and sometimes illusory sensations elicited by the Civil War led writers to the modern discourses of health and history, which are premised on the existence of a corporeal and often critical reality that practitioners cannot know fully yet believe in nevertheless. Professional thinkers and doers both literally and figuratively sought to rehabilitate--to reclothe, normalize, and stabilize--Civil War bodies and the stories that accounted for them.
Taking a fresh look at the work of canonical war writers such as Louisa May Alcott and Stephen Crane while examining anew public records, journalism, and medical writing, Long brings the study of the Civil War into conversation with recent critical work on bodily ontology and epistemology and theories of narrative and history.
Lisa A. Long teaches literature and gender and women's studies at North Central College.
2003 | 344 pages | 6 x 9 | 6 illus.
ISBN 978-0-8122-3748-1 | Cloth | $65.00s | �.50
ISBN 978-0-8122-0266-3 | Ebook | $65.00s | �.50
World Rights | Cultural Studies, Literature, American History
List of contents
Introduction. Year That Trembled and Reel'd beneath Me
Chapter 1. Doctors' Bodies: Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and Patient Malingering
Chapter 2. Dead Bodies: Mourning Fictions and the Corporeity of Heaven
Chapter 3. Sanitized Bodies: The United States Sanitary Commission and Soul-Sickness
Chapter 4. Experimental Bodies: African American Writers and the Rehabilitation of War Work
Chapter 5. Soldiers' Bodies: Historical Fictions and the Sickness of Battle
Chapter 6. Nursing Bodies: Civil War Women and Postbellum Regeneration
Chapter 7. Historical Bodies: African American Scholars and the Discipline of History
Epilogue. Conjuring Civil War Bodies
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
About the author
Lisa A. Long teaches literature and gender and women's studies at North Central College.
Summary
Taking a look at the work of war writers and examining public records, journalism, and medical writing, this book brings the study of the Civil War into conversation with the critical work on bodily ontology and epistemology and theories of narrative and history.
