Bodies of Reform

James B. Salazar is Assistant Professor of English at Temple University.

Part of the American Literatures Initiative SeriesFrom the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet equally formidable "stuff," has had a long and checkered history giving shape to the American national identity.Bodies of Reform reconceives this pivotal category of nineteenth-century literature and culture by charting the development of the concept of "character" in the fictional genres, social reform movements, and political cultures of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. By reading novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside a diverse collection of texts concerned with the mission of building character, including child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines, libel and naturalization law, Scout handbooks, and success manuals, James B. Salazar uncovers how the cultural practices of representing character operated in tandem with the character-building strategies of social reformers. His innovative reading of this archive offers a radical revision of this defining category in U.S. literature and culture, arguing that character was the keystone of a cultural politics of embodiment, a politics that played a critical role in determining-and contesting-the social mobility, political authority, and cultural meaning of the raced and gendered body.

Contents; Acknowledgments vi; Introduction: The Grandest Thing in the World 1; 1. Philanthropic Taste: Race and Character in Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man 43; 2. Character is Capital: Manufacturing Habit in Mark Twain's Character-Factory 78; 3. Muscle Memory: Building the Body Politic of Character in Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the National Police Gazette 139; 4. "A Story Written on Her Face": Pauline Hopkins's Unmaking of the Inherited Character of Race 193; 5. Character's Conduct: Spaces of Interethnic Emulation in Jane Addams's "Charitable Effort" 258; Notes 310; Index; About the Author 384