The human is flesh: Science and medicine in literature, 1780--1870

My dissertation reads the work of British and American authors in conjunction with concurrent developments in medical discourses on normal and pathological bodies. The rapid spread of anatomical, psychiatric, and ethnographic research and institutions in the 19th century drew awareness to social differences, at the same time as those differences became "scientific" rather than social. The literary response to these developments ranges from an integration of medicine as a formal aesthetic principle at the turn of the 19th century, to the actively parodic treatment of such themes by the century's end.;The first and second chapters discuss William Blake, Charles Brockden Brown, John Keats and the use of medicine in the literature of the early Romantic period. Disease is a liminal space where the Romantic separation between mind and body blurs to the point of indestinction. Furthermore, that indistinction destabilizes the social structures and boundaries through which a coherent identity is produced.;The dissertation's next three chapters follow the literary response to medicine's expanded interest in raced and classed bodies that reached its zenith by mid-century. Through analyses of the typologies of corporeal difference enumerated by George Gliddon. Josiah Nott, Samuel Morton, this dissertation examines the manner in which scientific racial and class markers are employed in the poetry and prose of Herman Melville, Maria Gowen Brooks, and Rebecca Harding Davis. The medicalization of the body---though a process intended to produce a more rigid delineation of bodily difference---instead creates a fluid, productive context whereby the possibilities of identity are compounded and confused.;This dissertation emphasizes the manner in which the boundaries produced by the articulation of bodily differences underscore certain anxieties over inclusion within privileged racial, class, gender, and sexual groups. With attention to such clinicians and medical commentators as Samuel Morton and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, my dissertation articulates the matrices of corporeal understanding across the categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality during the 19th century. While these typologies are presented within medical discourses, the identities enumerated in these typologies are constructed and constrained by cultural discourses that delineate the boundaries and anxieties attendant to their construction.