The Human is Flesh: Science, Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Medicine in American and British Literature, 1780-1870

This book reads the work of British and American authors in conjunction with concurrent developments in medical discourses on normal and pathological bodies. The rapid spread of anatomical, psychiatric, and ethnographic research and institutions in the 19th century drew awareness to social differences, at the same time as those differences became scientific rather than social. The literary response to these developments ranges from an integration of medicine as a formal aesthetic principle at the turn of the 19th century, to the actively parodic treatment of such themes by the end of the century. This book emphasizes the manner in which the boundaries produced by the articulation of bodily differences underscore certain anxieties over inclusion within privileged racial, class, gender, and sexual groups. While these typologies are presented within medical discourses, the identities enumerated in these typologies are constructed and constrained by cultural discourses that delineate the boundaries and anxieties attendant to their construction.