Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-285) and index
Introduction: remapping the nineteenth-century literary landscape -- The body in the body politic: race, gender, and sexuality in nineteenth-century America -- The spectacle of the body: corporeality in Lydia Maria Child's antislavery writing -- Deflecting the public's gaze and disciplining desire: Harper's antebellum poetry and Reconstruction fiction -- Saxons and slavery: corporeal challenges to Ralph Waldo Emerson's Republic of the spirit -- The new face of empire: the price of Margaret Fuller's progressive feminist project -- "Who need be afraid of the merge?": Whitman's radical promise and the perils of seduction -- "Never before had my puny arm felt half so strong": corporeality and transcendence in Jacobs's incidents -- Epilogue: Martin R. Delany and the politics of ethnology
