1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910463235203321

Autore

Long Lisa A

Titolo

Rehabilitating bodies [[electronic resource] ] : health, history, and the American Civil War / / Lisa A. Long

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia, : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2004

ISBN

0-8122-0266-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (339 p.)

Disciplina

973.7

Soggetti

Ontology

Ontology in literature

Knowledge, Theory of

Knowledge, Theory of, in literature

Human body (Philosophy)

Human body in literature

Electronic books.

United States History Civil War, 1861-1865 Historiography

United States History Civil War, 1861-1865 Health aspects

United States History Civil War, 1861-1865 Psychological aspects

United States History Civil War, 1861-1865 Literature and the war

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [301]-315) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Year That Trembled and Reel'd beneath Me -- 1 Doctors' Bodies: Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and Patient Malingering -- 2 Dead Bodies: Mourning Fictions and the Corporeity of Heaven -- 3 Sanitized Bodies: The United States Sanitary Commission and Soul Sickness -- 4 Experimental Bodies: African American Writers and the Rehabilitation of War Work -- 5 Soldiers' Bodies: Historical Fictions and the Sickness of Battle -- 6 Nursing Bodies: Civil War Women and Postbellum Regeneration -- 7 Historical Bodies: African American Scholars and the Discipline of History -- Epilogue: Conjuring Civil War Bodies -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

The American Civil War is one of the most documented, romanticized,



and perennially reenacted events in American history. In Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War, Lisa A. Long charts how its extreme carnage dictated the Civil War's development into a lasting trope that expresses not only altered social, economic, and national relationships but also an emergent self-consciousness. Looking to a wide range of literary, medical, and historical texts, she explores how they insist on the intimate relationship between the war and a variety of invisible wounds, illnesses, and infirmities that beset Americans throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and plague us still today.Long shows how efforts to narrate credibly the many and sometimes illusory sensations elicited by the Civil War led writers to the modern discourses of health and history, which are premised on the existence of a corporeal and often critical reality that practitioners cannot know fully yet believe in nevertheless. Professional thinkers and doers both literally and figuratively sought to rehabilitate-to reclothe, normalize, and stabilize-Civil War bodies and the stories that accounted for them.Taking a fresh look at the work of canonical war writers such as Louisa May Alcott and Stephen Crane while examining anew public records, journalism, and medical writing, Long brings the study of the Civil War into conversation with recent critical work on bodily ontology and epistemology and theories of narrative and history.