| "Emotional Distress: Literary and Cultural Configurations of Pain" maps a struggle with a new idiom in the United States, an emerging vocabulary of pain and injury, one that has helped to transform the definitions of self as well as nation. The dissertation begins with the development of cultural cognition about injury in antebellum sentimental novels, novels which helped to demonize bodily pain and punishment in the cultural psyche, tracing its evolution in America's foremost crisis of injury, the Civil War, when injuries to bodies and minds were beginning to become primary conceptual and critical tools for self-representation. The dissertation asks what it means to have an emergent language about injury, by meditating upon its semantic surfaces and its deep structures. Why, for instance, when the Civil War demonstrated the capacity for technology to inflict grave injury on the human body, did a record of wounds that were not solely marked by the dimensions of the body but by the troubles of the mind begin to get written?; The questions raised by the horrors of America's first modern war, the Civil War, and what was coming to be recognized as the stunning capacity for technology to inflict injury upon the bodies of wounded soldiers, resonates in the problems that attended industrialism in the nineteenth-century. "Emotional Distress" foregrounds the transformations in tort law, work and labor relations, and the rise of psychology as a discipline in the United States, juxtaposing them against the stories Americans have told about themselves and their sufferings, stories which provide a context for the changing notions of what constitutes "injury." The study analyzes the novel's contribution to the conceptual and experiential evolution of injury and its evolving predicaments in the United States, particularly by interrogating, within this semantic frame, the gendering of injury, as well as the many fraught terms accompanying injury and its recompense, terms such as "evidence," "compensation," and "protection."... |
