We first meet Jason Auster when he climbs out of a stagecoach in a New England maritime town and, as it were, salutes destiny. A twenty-year-old house carpenter who has come adventuring, Jason hopes to "put in practice certain theories concerning the rights of men and property which had already made him a pest at home." And, indeed, theory and practice, destiny and self-determination are all following quite different paths as this antebellum story of love and power, incest and family honor, and sexual bonds and intractable conflicts between races and classes plays out against the backdrop of...
We first meet Jason Auster when he climbs out of a stagecoach in a New England maritime town and, as it were, salutes destiny. A twenty-year-old house...
What we know of the marked body in nineteenth-century American literature and culture often begins with "The Scarlet Letter"'s Hester Prynne and ends with Moby Dick's "Queequeg." This study looks at the presence of marked men and women in a more challenging array of canonical and lesser-known works, including exploration narratives, romances, and frontier novels. Jennifer Putzi shows how tattoos, scars, and brands can function both as stigma and as emblem of healing and survival, thus blurring the borderline between the biological and social, the corporeal and spiritual.
Examining such...
What we know of the marked body in nineteenth-century American literature and culture often begins with "The Scarlet Letter"'s Hester Prynne and en...
