'The good body': Normalizing visions in nineteenth-century American literature and culture

This dissertation examines literary and cultural representations of so-called "abnormal" bodies in the antebellum and Civil War-era United States and the ways in which these representations operated as a means of justifying, critiquing, and problematizing prominent concerns of the period: the relationship between the health of American citizens and national progress, the aesthetic quality of popular culture, Western expansion, debates over slavery, the threatened dissolution of the Union in the Civil War, and the legitimation of the post-war reunified nation. Considering a wide range of sources-classic works of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry, health reform textbooks, popular magazines, pro-slavery articles, Civil War memoir, photographs of Civil War veterans, and medical records of the federal government-this study illustrates that American literature of this period typically imagined real and fictional bodies as healthy, aesthetically pleasing, and symbolically coherent in relation to other bodies imagined as deviating from these "norms" either to preserve existing political and social orders or to challenge the hegemonic power of U.S. institutions. In addition to the strictly literary material considered, also central in this project are critical approaches to history and disability studies which illuminate the construction of physical "normality" and contribute to recent scholarly attempts to locate the modern perception of physical normality in the field of U.S. literature and in periods earlier than the late nineteenth century.