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...
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...
Elizabeth Stoddard Jennifer Putzi Elizabeth Stockton
In response to the resurgence of interest in American novelist, poet, short-story writer, and newspaper correspondent Elizabeth Stoddard (1823 1902), whose best-known work is "The Morgesons" (1862), Jennifer Putzi and Elizabeth Stockton spent years locating, reading, and sorting through more than 700 letters scattered across eighteen different archives, finally choosing eighty-four letters to annotate and include in this collection. By presenting complete, annotated transcripts, "The Selected Letters" provides a fascinating introduction to this compelling writer, while at the same time...
In response to the resurgence of interest in American novelist, poet, short-story writer, and newspaper correspondent Elizabeth Stoddard (1823 1902), ...