Description
- Abstract:
- My dissertation examines the relationship between aesthetic forms and the governance of life. I argue that the materially reductionist accounts of persons in realist and naturalist fiction—the “crawling yeast,” “elemental stuff,” and “protoplasmic” puddles that populate the works of Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, Jack London, Frank Norris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others—radically reimagined life as an object of political intervention. I call this new poetics of embodiment, in which life is rendered equivalent to sheer biological substrate, the biomaterial imagination. Whereas early nineteenth-century materialisms such as those of Poe or Shelley viewed such reductions as monstrous denaturings of humanity, artists and scientists at the fin-de-siècle had begun to view the human as itself constituted through an inhuman materiality that necessitated perpetual biopolitical administration. My chapters document the cross-pollinations between literary fiction and the culture of transatlantic science to show how questions of narrative form, representation, and textual circulation became entangled with understandings of the body’s productive and reproductive processes. Edith Wharton’s engagement with contemporary medical science and the ethics of euthanasia, Jack London’s writings on the American prison system and technologies of capital punishment, Charles Chesnutt’s work on tort law and the materialist doctrine of strict liability, as well as Frank Norris and Ellen Glasgow’s writings on germ theory and the public health movement constitute an underexamined archive of biopolitical thought that both sowed the imaginative seeds for the violent racial purification projects of the twentieth century and, in the same gesture, provoked new ways of theorizing the human that rejected the dream of purity at the level of race and species alike.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2018
Access Conditions
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Citation
Hollingshead, David,
"The Biomatters of American Modernity"
(2018).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/6n0v-8e04
