@article{1480245,
      recid = {1480245},
      author = {Salazar, James B., },
      title = {Bodies of Reform : The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age  America /},
      pages = {1 online resource},
      abstract = {From 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.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1480245},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814741306.001.0001},
}