Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America

by Joan Burbick

• ISBN13: 9780521106733
• ISBN10: 0521106737
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-04-02
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The creation of an American national culture in the nineteenth century coincided with a common belief that the emerging nation was diseased and in need of healing. Reading nineteenth-century narratives of health by a wide variety of authors, Burbick exposes the fears and conflicts underlying the creation of an American national culture. In studying these narratives of the body, this pioneering and comprehensive work concludes that a fundamental uneasiness about democracy may result in a collective, willful effort to control the body trope as a means of composing social order.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Textures of Authority

The Common Senses of America

Writing the Constitution of the Body

Fictions of the Body Politic

Riddles of the Brain

The Tell-tale Heart

Nervous Reports

The Recording Eye

Conclusions: Somatic Politics

Notes

Index

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